Division Review Issue 32 - Winter 2024

A QUARTERLY PSYCHOANALYTIC FORUM

NO.32 WINTER 2024

URGENCIES

FASCISM, PASSIBILITY, AND THE UNSETTLED UNCONSCIOUS | ALBAITI

AN ODE TO LOSS | HAJJAR

RE-MEMBERANCE AGAINST GENOCIDE | QURAN

THE ANALYTIC FIELD

INTERVIEW WITH AVGI SAKETOPOULOU | HAJJAR & ALBAITI

READING SEXUALITY BEYOND CONSENT IN BEIRUT | NAHHAS

REMINISCENCE

TREASURES OF THE WELL | CHARLES

COMMENTARIES

FROM THE SPPP 43rd ANNUAL SPRING MEETING: SEX

SEX IN REVIEW | CHAVEZ

REFLECTIONS EMERGING FROM DIS-POSSESSION | SHEEHI

CAN THERE BE RESTORATION WITHOUT ERASURE? | DEVINNEY

EXPANDING ON THE CONTAINING FUNCTION OF KINK | BÁEZ-POWELL

SAKETOPOULOU AVEC LACAN | PIETRUSZA

SPECIAL SECTION

CRYPTONOMIC ANALYSES : On a sex worker-therapist collaboration | PIETRUSZA

EXIGENT CARE: an Interview with Ashley Ramos | PIETRUSZA

PHOTOGRAPHY

ON MARK MCKNIGHT’S HEAVEN IS A PRISON | GREENWELL

CONTENTS

URGENCIES

3 Safia Albaiti Fascism, Passibility, and the Unsettled Unconscious

6 Roula Hajjar An Ode to Loss

9 Razzan Quran Re-memberance against Genocide

THE ANALYTIC FIELD

11 Roula Hajjar and Interview with Avgi Saketopoulou Safia Albaiti

21 Nour Nahhas Reading Sexuality Beyond Consent in Beirut

REMINISCENCE

24 Marilyn Charles Treasures of the Well

COMMENTARIES FROM SPPP 43rd SPRING MEETING: SEX

28 Jessica Chavez SEX in Review

30 Lara Sheehi Reflections emerging from dis-possession

32 helen DeVinney Can there be restoration without erasure?

34 Natalia Báez-Powell Expanding On the Containing Function of kink

36 Celeste Pietrusza Saketopoulou avec Lacan

SPECIAL SECTION

38 Celeste Pietrusza Cryptonomic Analyses: On a sex worker-therapist collaboration

38 Celeste Pietrusza Exigent Care: an Interview with Ashley Ramos

PHOTOGRAPHY

42 Garth Greenwell On Mark McKnight’s Heaven is a Prison

EDITOR Loren Dent

GUEST EDITORS

Roula Hajjar and Safia Albaiti.

SENIOR EDITORS

Steven David Axelrod, J. Todd Dean, William Fried, William MacGillivray, Marian Margulies, Bettina Mathes, Manya Steinkoler

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Gemma Marangoni Ainslie, Ricardo Ainslie, Christina Biedermann, Chris Bonovitz, Steven Botticelli, Ghislaine Boulanger, Patricia Gherovici, Peter Goldberg, Adrienne Harris, Elliott Jurist, Jane Kupersmidt, Paola Mieli, Donald Moss, Ronald Naso, Donna Orange, Robert Prince, Allan Schore, Robert Stolorow, Nina Thomas, Usha Tummala, Jamieson Webster, Lynne Zeavin

BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Anna Fishzon

FOUNDING EDITOR

David Lichtenstein

PHOTOGRAPHY BY

Mark Armijo McKnight

DESIGN BY

Hannah Alderfer, HHA design, NYC

DIVISION | REVIEW

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ISSN 2166-3653

URGENCIES

Fascism, Passibility, and the Unsettled Unconscious

Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, The superstitious atheist.

—Robert Browning, Bishop Blougram’s Apology, 1855

What does “passibility” look like in a time of genocide and fascism? In discussing “passibility,” I refer back to this Lyotardian term, through Avgi Saketopoulou’s articulation of this as a capacity for greater risktaking and risk tolerance, the ability to relinquish “the ordinary ways in which boundaries are patrolled in everyday life” (Saketopoulou, 2023), to create a surrender to the absolute unknown in oneself, a position of untethering and a release from conservatism, so that transformation and new translations of oneself can occur. Saketopoulou describes this experience for the exigent sadist as always fleeting and temporary.

When genocide’s excess is now considered part of the rhythm of everyday reasonable violence, our ability to psychically contain becomes impossible. The air feels brittle and tense all the time. We have become accustomed now to the ways that reasonable violence grinds on, becomes transmitted to us through the algorithm, and just as easily disappears from the news cycle—a fate somehow worse than the fact itself. Reasonable violence now looks like the many ways human flesh can become hollowed out, pulverized, and turned into ash. Reasonable violence is what Israel and its Western allies can inflict on a Palestinian in the world today without the need to report on it. A mother screaming, “My six children who couldn’t fit in our tent now all fit in the palm of my hand.” A father asking about his dead six-year-old child and being handed a bag instead, “They gave me a bag that had 18 kilos of body pieces. I’m burying the pieces, and I don’t know whether some are my son Ali or not.”. The designation Wounded Child, No Surviving Family. The loss of eye and limb from an exploded pager. Those who survive will be known by their amputations.

Swedish Marxist writer Andreas Malm has called what is happening in Gaza the first “technogenocide” of the twenty-first century (Malm, 2024). He differentiates what is happening in Gaza– a high-tech genocide carried out by shipments of American weaponry powered by fossil fuels– from the Shoah, which was the last high-tech genocide powered by coal, and from more recent “low tech” genocides, in Rwanda, Bosnia and the ISIS campaign against Yazidis, which involved the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of souls but without the devastating airpower wiping out Palestinian family

lines and scorching the earth. This is what led Colombian President Gustavo Petro to say, “Genocide and barbaric acts unleashed against the Palestinian people is what awaits those who are fleeing the south because of the climate crisis…Why have large, carbonconsuming countries allowed the systematic murder of thousands of children in Gaza? Because Hitler has already entered their homes, and they are getting ready to defend their high levels of carbon consumption and reject the exodus it causes”.

Hitler has already entered their homes. The excess that many of us find unbearable simply does not reach those who have the power to impose an arms embargo, order a ceasefire, or offer a future to those being killed at a rate faster than they are entering the world. The Palestinian writer Nasser Abourahme (2024) argues that Palestine is the living archive of our future and a warning of a future marked by untouchability.

During our interview for this issue, Saketopoulou asked us, as guest editors, where we came from, to situate us within a shared experience of all hailing from postcolonial nations outside the US, with varying degrees of legibility to the American reader. So I want to return to her question here as a way of articulating these degrees of legibility and, by way of asking, can we think of passibility as a feature of nation states too, and the national unconscious? Can we think more along the contours of the nation-as-body politic– to be porous, geographically and politically permeable, to be passible, touched and transgressed upon by movements and historical events, by the promiscuity of raced and classed desegregation, anti-fascism, open borders and, once in a while, revolutionary impulse? This is the question that preoccupies, confounds, haunts, and rouses every shade of Marxist, and it is the question I usually return to, out of habit, because it is pervasive, in and out of the consulting room.

As a child of the Yemeni diaspora, from a specific region whose people have a pragmatic and ambivalent relationship to land and the nation-state, I spent my childhood in my grandfather’s home in Tanzania, a country led into independence from British colonial rule by a teacher, Nyerere, whose era of passibility during the Cold War included everything from personally translating Shakespeare into Swahili to declaring Tanzania’s support for pan-African socialism, an end to apartheid in Southern Africa, and the hosting of political exiles from the ANC, FRELIMO, and the Black Panther Party. In April 1994, in what was, in hindsight, the last gasp of this openness, Tanzania opened its border to those fleeing the genocide that had begun in Rwanda, and over 100,000 Rwandan Tutsis crossed the Rusomo Bridge at the border

Safia ALBAITI

in the span of 24 hours. Neoliberalism has changed this legacy, but living in that transitory time in the nineties gave me an understanding of the power of permeability in even the quietest countries. My mother would often recount with awe, pride, and humor the ways that my grandfather weathered the tides of post-colonial independence and nationalist repossession and confiscation to build his wealth. I have always listened to this story of mythmaking with equal parts amusement and materialist skepticism. Of course, I would think to myself, no one is just a self-made man; of course, my grandfather was one Arab beneficiary among many African others of this one-time postcolonial transfer of wealth; others worked for him, and their labor created those profits. However, what lingers more these days for me are the details of the government confiscations and petty burglaries my grandparents experienced. The story of the robber who apologized profusely to the housekeeper whose wrists he tied together as they burglarized the safe. I think now of these stories as a time when my grandparents were able to sustain the risk of being transgressed upon again and again by the new young postcolonial nation as it attempted to redistribute wealth and power to the poor and the new state bureaucrats. My grandfather did not flee to a closed-off, gated community; such was not his era. He passed away in 2020, and his home and garden in the heart of the city and its commercial district– that housed pet tortoises and garden snakes and coconut trees, and in another time before I was born, owls and flamingoes and bushbabies– were sold. I try to reflect more on the interpersonal sadomasochisms we emerged from, too; what it took for my grandfather and grandmother to decide to stay put, to face this kind of postcolonial shakeup to the ego and to their world, and let it change them and eventually, their eleven children. What has become my translation, and what remains forever beyond my grasp.

At 9 years old, I would linger around the living room, waiting to read my grandfather’s copy of The African and other newspapers that he brought home, and through my teen years, getting to know the work of syndicated journalists who brought the world in closer proximity to me. I have kept up this ritual for my whole life. I learned at a young age to believe that the world was knowable and that our relationship to politics matters, shapes lives, and reflects our agency. This feels increasingly out of place in our avaricious, dystopian present. I was brought back to these memories again watching South Africa take Israel to the International Court of Justice for crimes of genocide in Gaza last year, moved once again to see another postcolonial African country carrying the load of another colonized people, as others had done before.

However, the International Court of Justice appears more radical than it is for attempting to impose guardrails to prevent Israel from committing further acts of genocide in Gaza and for arguing that Israel cannot expect to remain untouched by the human rights standards of the past. The ICJ uses the tools of past tribunals against genocide that were built on the presupposition that fascist times would be increasingly behind us rather than the norm of the ever-grinding present. The past seems to radicalize to compensate for the impenetrable deadening present that calcifies traumatophobia.

How can we retain this capacity to recover that slippery fugitivity implanted by our ancestors, to borrow from Saketopoulou’s conceptualization of Fred Moten’s writings? Can passibility be the quality of inhabiting the histories of the momentous struggles of our nations and having that embedded, waiting to emerge, when the ego is shaken up, and the status quo becomes unbearable and impossible to restore? Perhaps we can do more to consider those libidinal elements of the sexual unconscious born from times that are alien and unassimilable to our current era. Avgi Saketopoulou describes bending the will as an act involving the breakdown of the ego and the expansion of the self. How can we internalize this logic in an age of manufactured scarcity, capitalist miserliness, cloud capital, hostile architecture, walls, checkpoints, and closed borders? Over the last ten months, we have witnessed the accelerated deadening and collapsing of language and meaning. It was crushing enough to hear “thoughts and prayers” handed out every time a mass shooting killed the promise of youth in America, an iteration of Kamala Harris’s vow to make the US “the most lethal fighting force in the world” if she is elected president. However, the asphyxiation of speech and movement that comes from defenses of Israeli fascism can be witnessed in the degradation of the commons and the sprouting of “cop cities” around the US, which partner and train with the Israeli Defense Forces around expanding policing and prisons over life-affirming social investment in schools, libraries, housing, public transit, health care, and the humanities. It is hard to argue that America isn’t dying.

The need for passibility has never been more urgent and signals we are not yet dealing with a cadaver. I think of how the abolition of slavery in the US came about through a revolution against Confederate states, which was also influenced and impregnated by the geopolitics of its time, from the struggle against slavery in Haiti to the failed revolutions of 1848 in Europe, with fugitives, freedmen and immigrant Forty-eighters joining the Union Army’s unsure march to victory in the Civil War, never at any point a majoritarian project.

URGENCIES

The expansion of birthright citizenship in the country came not through settler colonial rule but through the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing citizenship to the formerly enslaved. That is, a struggle for liberation that does not fully arrive can nevertheless produce a lasting translation, a constitutional right increasingly considered anachronistic in a new world of golden visas and brokered golden passports while stirring up antebellum fantasies and blood libel accusations about the overrunning of borders and Haitian immigrants arriving in small towns to eat pets and contribute to the sexual ruination of America. However, these fears betray the fact that the US habitually repeats its porous history. It was always going to be a global context that made the world look upon Emmett Till’s mutilated face at his mother’s insistence on an open casket funeral after his murder in Mississippi. White fantasies of miscegenation had been registered as the foremost preoccupation of Southern whites to the challenge of desegregation in Gunnar Myrdal’s study, An American Dilemma, in 1941, the year Emmett Till was born. But after his lynching, none could have compelled the world to look upon his destroyed face save for the will of a grieving mother and the active agitation of left-wing parties outside the United States in the 1950s. Animated by the pressures of a twentieth century shaped by the Cold War and Soviet competition, the efforts of L’Humanité, Freies Volk, and the other newspapers in France, Belgium, Germany, and elsewhere contributed to the international outcry for a civil rights movement that would pry open the enclosed violent stagnant complacency of Jim Crow segregation and transform the country. Here are the ways we continue to be indebted to the practices of domestic and international overwhelm and fugitivity, both known and unknown, in foundational eras, despite attempts to domesticate or erase the sources of this legacy of freedom in the world (DuBois, 1935/1998).

The death of 25-year-old US Air Force serviceman Aaron Bushnell outside the front gate of the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC on February 25th, 2024, and his refusal to be party to the killing machine is one stark example of exigent sadism over the last year. His acceptance of the flames burning his body, his recording of his death in solidarity with Palestinians against genocide, and his decision to echo the spirit of the Vietnam antiwar movement and join a long history of political self-immolation against war stood out as the one time in the last eleven months that someone surpassed the reason of capitalist relations and normative political dissent to attempt a new translation. Nevertheless, I find myself doubtful, wondering these days if we have exhausted these referents and if they have become mere etchings of a society of yesteryear that used to be more movable.

A new political theology of the United States is congealing, shaped by the influence of the National Conservative Movement and its intellectual figurehead, Israeli-born intellectual and Benjamin Netanyahu’s former speechwriter, Yoram Hazony, who counts among his followers the Republican Vice Presidential nominee J.D. Vance. As historian Suzanne Schneider (2023) writes, the national conservative movement has been taken in by Hazony’s arguments that the US can and should “return” to the foundations of family, tribe, and Bible and define itself as a Christian nation, with a token illiberal democracy. Here, Hazony points to Israel’s success at defining itself as a Jewish nation whose raison d’etre is precisely the fact that it does not have the consent of the occupied. While none of these pronouncements are novel necessarily, Schneider points out that in his desire to align American interests with Israel’s, to build out a newer foundation of the “special relationship” that is fraying under pressure from a growing movement to end US aid to Israel, Hazony misunderstands, indeed, might be misrecognizing the contradiction inherent to AngloAmerican constitutional history; which, in the final measure, is basically an imprint of how far struggles against genocide and slavery have been able to go.

Schneider argues that Hazony borrows from Zionism’s transposition of Eastern European Volk blood-and-soil nationalism to Palestine and simply assumes the same could be said and done in the US. Here, I believe this particular distinction that Schneider points out offers a kind of differentiation of a new potentiality. Abourahme argues that political orders that have closed their moments of foundational conquest have managed to consign them to a political unconscious that is “settled,” and this distinguishes other settler colonial states from Israel today. Palestinians today have managed to pry open time by refusing to be erased in this way. But here, I want to argue against the notion that there is such a thing as a “settled” political unconscious, even in the most established and hegemonic states. It is in the very nature of the unconscious that it cannot be settled, that a crisis or turbulent period reawakens what may have temporarily appeared to be resolved. A traumatophilic psychoanalytic perspective rests on this countervailing premise. Analysts are trained to avoid colonizing the patient’s time, thoughts, and speech in the consulting room because of this dimension and this wager on the unsettled unconscious (even though many will err). That is the source of the radical potentiality behind the knowledge that, unless and until the reality of death itself, the unconscious can never be settled and “cured” but can be opened up to the intervention of many Others and draws alterity more into itself.

The further away we get from historical antecedents that bring us a life-affirming world, the more important the fugitivity of the sexual unconscious in radicalizing the past and reigniting its force on us. How can we create the capacity for this fugitivity to take hold libidinally, move more easily, and exercise a degree of passibility in ourselves, our spaces, and our countries? After Gaza, we know there is no limit now to how much we can be shaken to our core, but what are the conditions to end the death-making and enclosures of apartheid? Who fears the exigent sadism required to make that possible?

Perhaps psychoanalysis might be useful for questions of political strategy during such recognizably material stalemates. Its principle of unknowability offers another dimension of openness to the future, the injection of doubt against neat little predictions, sitting

in tension with the political determinism of our present discourse. Can there be another way of seeing what Palestine teaches us, and the embodied horrors of American white supremacy and imperialist wars, so that we can better listen for the return of fugitivity and overwhelm that has operated closer to that wound and roiled the national sexual unconscious on this hemisphere and beyond?

I want to thank the other participants of the Black Reconstruction summer reading group that took place June-August 2024 for providing me with that admittedly very ego-syntonic small oasis of political depth, reflective distance, and Marxist historiography to think through the crisis of the American empire in this century and Israel’s genocide in Palestine, by engaging with DuBois’ account of America’s second revolutionary war. My gratitude to Avi, Laura, Linda and Sam for the generativity of the space.

WORKS CITED

Abourahme, N. (2024, Sept. 2). In tune with their time Radical Philosophy.https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/ article/in-tune-with-their-time

Du Bois, W. E. B. (1998). Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880. Free Press.

Malm, A. (2024, April 8). The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth. Verso Books. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/ the-destruction-of- palestine-is-the-destruction-of-the-earth Petro, G. (2023, December 1). Statement of President of the Republic of Colombia, Gustavo Petro Urrego, at the COP28 High Level Segment National Statements Opening. [Speech transcript]. Presidencia de la República.https://www.presidencia.gov.co/prensa/Paginas/ President-Petro-The-unleash-of-genocide-and-barbarism-on-the-Palestinian-people-is-what-awaits-the-exodus-231201.aspx

Saketopoulou A. (2023). Sexuality beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia. New York: NYU Press.

Schneider, S. (2023). Light among the Nations. Jewish Currents.https://jewishcurrents.org/light-among-the-nations Sitman, M. & Adler-Bell, S. (Hosts). (2024, July 19). Yoram Hazony’s Israeli Model (w/Suzanne Schneider). [Audio podcast episode]. In Know Your Enemy. Dissent Magazine. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/ know-your-enemy-yoram-hazonys-israeli-model/

An Ode to Loss

Roula HAJJAR

“I’m scared of a history that has only one version. History has dozens of versions, and for it to ossify into one leads only to death…we mustn’t see ourselves in their mirror, for they’re prisoners of one story, as through the story had abbreviated and ossified them…Please, father –you mustn’t become just one story…You’re dying but you’re free. Free of everything and of your story.”

—Elias Khoury, Gate of the Sun

How do I find the precise words to describe a moment that has just vanished? Then again, what linguistic precision can capture the impact of two-thousand-pound bombs killing and maiming with such depravity that Gazan healthcare workers must estimate the death toll by weighing human remains in plastic bags and dividing them by an average weight by age metric? Can we get the weight by age metric for a three-year-old, please? What exact words can describe the brutality of technology that turns Palestinian bodies into the earth that fills craters 30 feet deep and 15 feet wide?

Who am I, the speaker, tasked with finding such precision? Who am I in a future already past? Who am I in noncoloniality, outside the mythosymbolic of Zionism? In the now-now, I am an Arab immigrant from Lebanon. My father was Assyrian, the son of a man who, as an infant, fled genocide in Southeast Turkey for the safety of Beirut. My mother is from the South of Lebanon. So was her mother and her mother’s mother. It was not the South of Lebanon, then. It was a part of Greater Syria, which Europeans thought to delineate differently in service of extending Mount Lebanon and constructing a modern Lebanon in the aftermath of WWI and the decline of the Ottoman Empire. It is the same land that twenty-four years ago was liberated from decades of illegal Israeli occupation. It is the place where Edward Said, a Palestinian, hurled a stone at an abandoned Israeli watchtower in 2000, an act which would place him within the collective moment of liberation, within a temporality that brings together the Intifada of the 1980s, twenty years before that moment. The alAqsa Intifada happened just as the stone was thrown. It is the land upon which the Battle of Bint Jbeil was waged in 2006, a watershed moment in the history of the Lebanese resistance that would be compared to the Battle at Dien Bien Phu. Now, this land is a battlefront in Israel’s war on Gaza, a genocide that has claimed the lives of over 40,000 Palestinians, orphaned tens of thousands of children, maimed tens of thousands more, erased universities, municipalities, libraries, archives,

and cultural centers and either bombed, invaded or besieged, often more than once, almost every hospital in the Gaza Strip (Assi, 2024). Then and now, the land of my mother exists in connection with objects and places that are not “dead monuments and artifacts destined for the museum and approved historical theme parks, but a remainder of ongoing native life” (Said, 2003, p. 49). Defiant life and the “battles waged against this genocide” in Gaza and across Palestine “will eventually be recognized historically up there with the great feats of anticolonial history…with the Battle of Bint Jbeil…even if we don’t quite have the language to talk about it as such” (Abourahme, 2024, p.18).

There is a telling of history that affixes the past and its relation to the present with linguistic precision and concurrent psychic ordering, rendering the past dead, closed, and done. Also possible is a telling of history that unfastens the past from constricting representations to make space for new significations. Eng & Kazanjian (2003) took up the question of loss and the politics of mourning in an anthology of essays that engaged the relationship between the apprehension of loss, and the way such an apprehension can produce a world of remains as a world of “new representations and alternate meanings” (p. 5). The presence of the past in the present, what is lost in what remains, bears a resemblance with melancholia, an unresolved grief, a mourning without end. Eng & Kazanjian (2003) recuperate melancholia and challenge its characterization as a pathological state. They suggest that an ongoing, expansive, and flexible relationship with the past, a relationship of continued investment and preoccupation with what is lost, beyond the limitation of the fixity of completed mourning and decathexis, is key to producing “not only psychic life and subjectivity but also the domain of remains” (Eng & Kazanjian, 2003, p. 4).

Avgi Saketopoulou’s work (Saketopoulou, 2023) beckons us to consider the generative potential of moving beyond fixed translations of history that the ego summons to organize and stabilize us, subjects in history. In Sexuality Beyond Consent, she brings into focus Laplanche’s theory of the infantile sexual, a force outside the aegis of the ego, fomenting escalating tensions without release, “the more and more” of experience that dips into unpleasure (Saketopoulou, 2023, p.33). It is on this treacherously intensifying ride with the infantile sexual that the subject is situated to create new translations, no more or less accurate than the translations they replace. However, the condition is that the subject surrenders to what the experience might stir in them. Saketopoulou calls “courting

overwhelm” a break with a conventional approach to the trauma-informed therapy industry, one buttressed by financial, medical, and political interests prioritizing regulation and order. What is the point of it all…this treacherousness, inciting of traumatisms, and opening to pain?

Let us go back to Khoury’s Gate of the Sun, to the words spoken by Dr. Khaleel at the bedside of his father figure, Yunis, in a makeshift hospital on the outskirts of Beirut. Dr. Khaleel is not a real doctor, except for a few months of medical training, and Yunis, a Palestinian resistance fighter, is in a coma. The narrative goes, “a temporary doctor in a temporary hospital in a temporary country.” Time is irrelevant, evoking exile, outsideness, an outsideness that conjures Moten’s notion of fugitivity and Glissant’s thinking of errantry. We move from the Nakba of 1948, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that resulted in the establishment of the State of Israel, to the Sabra and Shatila camp massacre of 1982, a joint operation between Israel and Lebanese Christian fascists, to the suffering and losses of the 1990s. “Dr.” Khaleel beseeches his beloved and dying Yunis to unfasten himself from the essentialism of one version of history, to unbind himself from one translation in order to craft a personal subjective relationship to his life, or else death. Khaleel wants Yunus to be melancholic, to be in an active and ongoing relationship with what he has lost, a libidinal investment that animates loss and its constantly changing relationship to what remains. Otherwise, a sure death awaits Yunus – a completed mourning that affixes loss, in its completed and saturated form, to a position in the past engaged only through navel-gazing nostalgia. Mourning without end, a melancholic position, is a “politics of mourning that might be active rather than reactive…abundant rather than lacking, social rather than solipsistic, militant rather than reactionary” (Eng & Kazanjian, 2003, p. 2). That is the point of it all. There is no other way, for the alienated, for the not at home in the world – for the wretched of the earth –than to confront an eviscerating overwhelm that turns up the disquiet of their opacity, a poetic outsideness often suffered, to find a subjective relationship with symbols imposed by the victors of history.

This act of strange insurgent agency disturbs the status quo outside of the ego’s will because it opens up time for the exiled, suspended between one binding translation and another and suspended like Yunis, the revolutionary fighter, in his coma. From Freud to Laplanche, Saketopoulou (2023) explains how a Lanplanchean conceptualization of the infantile sexual moved past what she calls

Freud’s “taming” of the infantile sexual, a turn away from speaking of a sexual tension that is escalatory and involves unpleasure, toward mature sexuality that concludes with discharge and dissipation, thus underemphasizing the fragmenting and disordering potential of the sexual drive (p.71).

How does this vector continue forward to capture and be captured by Saketopoulou? Is Saketopoulou giving us theory that is itself a force unfastening us to one telling of dominant history, a force that, in its openness to unruliness and multiplicity, is a theory with decolonial potential that incites the type of reconfiguration it speaks of? Is Saketopoulou saying something to psychoanalysis, both students and teachers, about the ethics of theorymaking at this moment? Saketopoulou often cites the exigency of this moment as driving the need for a change of theoretical course. Exigency is a knock on the door by subjects whom psychoanalysis has not taken in, not allowed itself to be affected by, not allowed itself to loosen up and change in response to – where a response would be mutually transformative for the body of theory and its subject. To open oneself up to overwhelm and the discomfort of being yanked away from a steadying dominant taxonomy of things so that one may be acted on by the external, surrendering to being affected in ways one was not prepared to be, is an ethics of theory making.

Surrendering to experience is to be receptive to the effect of the external acting on us, a state Saketopoulou, borrowing from Lyotard, calls “passibility” (p. 60). A few years prior to Lyotard’s (1988/1991) passibilité, Said (1983) used the term worldliness, “of being in the world and of the world,” “enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society.” Sheehi (2023) finds this worldliness similar to what Glissant (1997) would later call “mondialité” a “being in relations.” Both worldliness and mondialité situate the individual in history and politics, a person within a structure of material asymmetries they continue to unmask and reconfigure. It is in this space that theory and its affective baggage swirl together, inseparable from one another. I find worldliness and mondialité forerunners of passibility. To receive experience and be touched by experience, one must be in some relation with people, places, objects, and values. This is not the relationality of the relational turn in psychoanalysis, nor the relationality that instrumentalizes repair with the insidious aim of quelling insurgent agency and safeguarding incumbent power relations. This is a relationality of being in the world with others as it is, in the material reality of it – “a shared and co-created asymmetrical world of exploitation, violence, and genocide as it is happening now in Gaza, and also, creativity, beauty and defiance” (Sheehi, 2024). At the core of this relationality is an

acceptance of risk that, at any moment, the allocentric subject might be touched by an external other that can never be fully grasped or seized (Saketopoulou, 2023). This point is especially salient in the time of genocidal colonial war and anticolonial liberation movements. Anticolonial movements create opportunities for political passibility by overturning relations of force, a challenge to the colonial order, where order is maintained through a machinery of non-reciprocity, separation, and untouchability. This inoculation against passibility has made settler colonialism vulnerable to the colonized’s passibility as a matter of their reality, their worldliness – millions of people are interpellated in the genocide in Gaza because they have been touched by settler colonial genocide, and they recognize themselves in it.

Abourahme (2024) argues that the “most primary organizing logic in colonial order is separation.” He details that this separation is physical, spacial, ontological, and psycho-affective, an enforced distance between subject and object. Abourahme connects this argument to Mbembe’s work on necropolitics by calling this a separation between the living body and the “bodythings” around it (Mbembe, p. 46). Here, colonial domination is a logic of unconditional non-reciprocity, a penetrating violence into native society, while colonial life remains untouched by the native other in return. “Its essence is not simply that it is raw and arbitrary, but untouchable. This is how it dehumanizes, because it refuses any kind of mutuality at the very point of intimacy, precisely where it intrudes deepest into bodily integrity” (Abourahme, 2024, p. 17). It is important to specify that we are beyond the point of mutuality in the way we are beyond the psychoanalytic confines of the relational school. We already live in a world past this possibility. A state of mutuality is a futurepast. We are, instead, coming up against the incommensurable between the genocidal violence of Zionism and the Palestinian body. These are irreconcilable tensions that call for reconfiguration.

To put Saketopoulou in conversation with Abourahme would be to find Zionism, the ideological engine of Israel’s brand of settler colonialism, devoted to a fixity, a closed system that has not, and cannot, make itself passible to the native other because it is premised on a power relation that operates along a logic of untouchability. The anticolonial liberation movement requires our passibility; it is a movement that wants to affect, to touch the other, even if, especially if, the other is affected to the point of truly encountering the discomfort of feeling threatened. For example, the Palestine solidarity movement that remains emergent on college campuses in response to the Israeli genocide in Gaza

has been brutally clamped down on by university administrators, elected officials, and law enforcement because these stakeholders have found it to be threatening and hostile. Long Chu (2023) contends that opposing this crackdown on pro-Palestine speech by instrumentalizing liberal rhetoric about the sanctity of free speech is irrelevant and futile. The point is not to support pro-Palestine speech by dismissing its potential to make an individual feel threatened or afraid but by witnessing that it could generate fear and, in doing so, affect or touch the listener who is threatened. I am back at the image of Said in the South of Lebanon. His body is an arrow. Said with the rock realized Said with theory just as Glissant found that “thought in reality” acted on the opacity and imaginary of peoples, so that “in them thought risks becoming realized” (Sheehi, 2024). The risk is in permitting oneself to be subjected to the other, to the threat posed by the other, keeping in mind that the extent to which the listener is threatened may have something to do with dominance within their social location, a dominance that is unsettled by another translation. In this instance, another translation involves two subjects touched by one another, a colonizing subject surrendering to the disquiet of encountering their brutality, and a colonized subject taking into their possession and rearticulating aspects of oneself “given by the socius itself constructed by and through white supremacy” that may have been part of the colonized subject’s very subjectivation (Saketopoulou, 2023, p.118). I believe this rearticulation of terms of subjectivation is what Abourahme (2024) is alluding to when he calls this current moment the “time of initiative/Zaman al-Mubadara” for the Palestinian anticolonial liberation movement (p. 15). In Gaza, in Palestine, and across the world, this movement – through willful ingenuity and defiant melancholy – demands, even imposes, a relationality where the colonizer is touched and affected by the native, a relationality that “opens up time” and gives the colonized subject the ability “to set its rhythm and tempos” (Abourahme, 2024. p. 16). Of course, all at a tremendous and devastating cost.

For those who have lost, melancholy and passibility forge alternative paths forward that hold the density of our loss, the force of our drive, and the promise of our investments. Melancholy has been my companion for many weeks and months. However, I did not know how to call it such. I would call it heartbreak. Stubbornness. Agitation. Rumination. Qahr. A fantasy of driving from my favorite beach in Sūr down a coastal highway to Akka, where I would meet a friend and decide if I wanted to drive back for an hour or stay the night A vigorous headshake to rid my mind of such indulgence. On better days, I watched all I had lost mercifully recede only

to redound with a cold and piercing force, like a wave I briefly turned my back on, catching me by surprise. I am stuck, I thought. I am haunted by Gaza. I lay in bed at 2 a.m. looking at pictures of the Haditha Massacre, the cold-blooded slaughter of twenty-four Iraqis by U.S. Marines almost twenty years ago— a couple of years after the liberation of the South and Said’s photo. The pictures had been hidden for nearly two decades and had just been made public because of several lawsuits against the U.S. military. I see the lifeless bodies of a mother and her child together in bed—their last sleep. There are numbers on their backs—the work of a red Sharpie. I do not understand. I feel it again. I am haunted

by Gaza. Palestine. “Melancholy people are [only] witness/accomplices of the signifier’s flimsiness” (Kristeva, 1989, p. 20). In its flimsiness, the signifier expands beyond its lost referent to take on endless representations, endless new translations and meanings, and “new social and political consequences” (Eng & Kazanjian, 2001, p. 5), like the subject beyond their limit. Palestine is the wound of the melancholic political subject seeking emancipation, retranslating, and reconfiguring the materials of their subjectivation. Everywhere we are, we are fixed in place by materials of late liberalism and late fascism. This liberatory moment is our unbinding. Palestine is everywhere. Palestine is the flimsy signifier.

REFERENCES

Abourahme, N. (2024, Summer). In tune with their time Radical Philosophy. https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/in-tune-with-their-time

Eng, D. & Kazanjian, D. (2002). Loss: The politics of mourning. University of California Press.

Glissant, E. (1997). Poetics of relation. The University of Michigan Press.

Khoury, E. (2006). Gate of the sun. Archipelago Books. Kristeva, J. (1989). Black sun: Depression and melancholia. Columbia University Press.

Long Chu, A. (2023, December 22). The free-speech debate is a trap. New York Magazine. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/free-speech-debate-free-palestine.html

Said, E. (1983). The world, the text, and the critic. Harvard University Press.

Said, E. (2014). Freud and the non-european. Verso Books Saketopoulou, A. (2023). Sexuality beyond consent: Risk, race, traumatophilia. New York University Press.

Sheehi, S. (2024, January 24). Theory as stone. Social Text Online. https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/theoryas-stone/

Re-memberance Against Genocide

Walid Daqqa was martyred on April 7th, 2024. Daqqa remains a Palestinian political prisoner, as his body remains in captivity, in accordance with Israel’s “postmortem detention” policy. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2022, one year prior to his scheduled release from a 35-year sentence. The Israeli military alleges Daqqa commanded a unit which killed an Israeli soldier. Daqqa repeatedly refused this accusation, but in a military court system with a 99% conviction rate against Palestinians, truth and justice have no cornerstone in due process.

In light of his cancer diagnosis, his family submitted multiple appeals to the Israeli military court, requesting his urgent release to ensure access to life-saving treatment. All appeals were consistently denied. Daqqa’s 35-year sentence was increased by two additional years for smuggling cell phones to political prisoners in his unit. He was not only denied treatment, but punished for supporting fellow prisoners in their attempts to connect with loved ones.

Walid Daqqa was 24 years old when he was detained. A Palestinian with Israeli citizenship, he was born and raised in Baqa Al-Gharbyeh to a family of modest means. Of his life trajectory, he wrote:

I must confess that I had not planned anything – not to become a fighter, nor to join any faction or party, nor even to engage in politics. Not because I deem all this wrong, nor because politics is undesirable or reprehensible as some perceive it to be, but simply because these were vast and intricate subjects for me. …. Instead, I could have simply carried on with my life as a painter or as a gas station worker, as I had done until I bore witness to the atrocities of the Lebanon War and the subsequent massacres of Sabra and Shatila.1

Daqqa’s political and philosophical musings were forged amidst harrowing genocide. It’s difficult to write an obituary for a man who represents a collective cause. There is an individuating tendency in obituaries; testimonies celebrating the life of a loved one or admired colleague. In the request to submit an obituary on Daqqa, a tension arose: how to honor the man while refusing the white supremacist hunger to defang and romanticize the cause?

Walid Daqqa as an individual embodied many virtues: his love of the arts, an insistence on cultivating humanity, an unrelenting faith in love, and an indomitable spirit. What defines him as an “organic psychoanalyst,” to play on Gramcsi’s “organic intellectual,” is his fortitude to study and observe temporalities of being while also engaging in hermeneutics

Razzan QURAN

against the brutality of imprisonment, torture, and isolation. In his writing, Daqqa recognized the unconscious and illustrated a capacity for precise insight about enactments, repressions, transferences and resistances within and without:

I want to assert that I only write because I want to remain steadfast and stalwart in captivity. … I think of writing as an operation of bypassing, of breaking out of those walls. … it is the tunnel that I dug under their walls that moors me to life outside, to what concerns my people in Palestine and the Arab world. This should not imply that my writing is a dissociation from my reality inside the prison. On the contrary, as much as it is a creation of textual reality, writing is a methodological tool to deconstruct and make sense of my reality as a prisoner.2

Daqqa never sought to romanticize political imprisonment. His psycho-sociopolitical work, Searing Consciousness: Or on Redefining Torture (2010)3, emerged from insights into colonial impasses on language and naming. Although he struggled with these impasses, he astutely identified their preconditions: settler colonialism and imperialism. They were socially constructed to psychically fragment Palestinians from their homeland: the sense that one is not isolated but embedded and reconstituted in the whole. He incisively discerned fragmentation, dissociation, and splitting as psychological processes produced by settler colonial logics. Palestinians know that the political prisoner is the teacher who transforms imprisonment into a school. Rather than pathologize or criminalize the individual who did not choose resistance in a vacuum, the political prisoner is recognized as one who forges pathways towards emancipation. Daqqa refused to reduce the political prisoner—or the Palestinian cause for that matter—to a romanticized ideal. He wrote about the devastating split from the homeland imposed upon the Palestinian subject. The intention of this psychological torture, he asserted, was to create psychic and material sites of death within Palestinian life. By identifying the underlying intentions of these strategies, Daqqa drew attention to the iterative processes which create and maintain “psychic political econom[ies] of life.”4

Representing the organic decolonized psychoanalyst, Daqqa persisted in exploring the realms of the unconscious, trailing signifiers and unearthing impasses meant to maim, confuse and ultimately subjugate the Palestinian subject:

In the jailer’s quest for control, he looks into the prisoner’s mirror to see his hideous self. He is afraid of what he has done, and what the reflections of this mirror may do to his self-perception, and so he seeks to destroy it.5

He is not one, but many: thrusted into liberation work, sentenced to a wrongful conviction, harassed under punitive sentence extensions – his life parallels the genocide, delusion, denial and negation enacted upon Palestinian people since the English mandate. Just as Aimé Césaire described another colonial context (quoting Baudelaire), “everything in this world reeks of crime, the newspaper, the wall, the countenance of man,” Daqqa was forced to inhale a repugnant scent. And yet he chose sovereignty over defeat, determination over acquiescence. Daqqa never concealed the contradictions of this world—he wove pain and tenderness, horror and steadfastness.

He wrote of his dual role as elder and prison mate; standing across a child turned political prisoner, his age became an outside artifact, and what remained inside was mutual recognition6. He mulled on his relationship with his daughter, a child who came to know that “father was confined” and that prison was a “room without a door.”7

The Palestinian—especially the Palestinian political prisoner—has been pummeled into the Western imaginary as a vile, dehumanized, patriarchal villain and terrorist. Walid punctures this fantasy, while never once writing to a Western audience. He inscribed his humanity, not for the gaze of the other, but to claim his own identification(s); the identifications of a people displaced, dispossessed, massacred, and still persevering and refusing to relent. Despite shock waves intended to thrust humanity into stunned infantilization, Walid, locked under inhumane conditions, insisted against dehumanization. Walid refused to let go of his softness, his imagination, or his will to love. He wrote, on the eve of his twentieth year of imprisonment, “the primary target is you as a social being, and the human within you … the target is your relationship with anything outside yourself, any relation you can have with humans and nature.”8 I urge you to shake off the impulse to romanticize, and rather to hold this man—amongst so many others—as a martyr, extrajudicially killed by a militarized settler colonial regime; one that casted him as subhuman, and unworthy of justice. A man immortalized, despite his body remaining captive post-mortem in Israeli freezers.

A man who is Palestine. Daqqa peered into his own psyche, an observing ego capacity alive with rebelliousness and willful refusal. Driven by insistence on humanity, Daqqa

wielded language in the form of allegory, metaphor, and poetry. This desire to speak despite the muted and fragmented horrors represents an ember within the Palestinian political prisoner. It is an ember which is nourished and tended to by integrating the accountability of the accomplices of the genocide.

During her address at the People’s Conference for Palestine, Sana’ Daqqah, Walid’s wife of 23 years, stated:

Walid and I wanted to do what most married couples desire, to have a child, to create a family. Because we are Palestinian, and because he is a political prisoner, our simple normal wish transforms into a revolutionary act.

Sana’ Daqqah is a journalist who met Walid during interviews she was conducting with Palestinian political prisoners. The couple fell in love and chose to marry. Their love, passion, and longing were stoked and tended to through their letters and surveilled visitations.

Milad, their child, is a materialization of Walid and Sana’s defiance of colonial captivity and isolation. Daqqa smuggled his sperm through the prison walls, conceiving possibility through fertile wombs of homeland. In Milad, whose name means “birth,” Walid

and Sana’s love bloomed against the brutality of the jailer. Here too, Daqqah represents the unforeclosed potentials of what it means to defy oppressive logics, and to embody the possibility of becoming anew.

Once again we are back to Césaire who noted the colonial world always smells of scum. If there was justice in the Israeli military courts, Daqqa would have been released. However, Daqqa—currently one of over ten thousand Palestinian political prisoners –spent his final moments confined by a system that perceives the Palestinian as a non-being. Daqqa is the personification of love. In his writing, in his love story with Sana’, in his offspring Milad, he defied various forms of dehumanization, fragmentation and terror. It is a remarkable endeavor, to pursue love despite so much insistence on hate and ugliness. Walid’s writing is a luscious forest, abundant in astute observations, reflexive identifications, and demonstrates his capacity to reclaim desire, identifications, and humanity despite the most depraved circumstances.

As of September 5th, 2024, the Israeli supreme court insists they will never return Walid Daqqa’s body. Posthumously, Walid remains a thorn in the throats of his occupiers. Even his funeral ceremony, a gathering in the home of his family, under a tent

to coalesce the weeping, longing, and grieving masses, was attacked with tear gas. What is the role of the psychoanalyst, and what fortifies a psychoanalyst? In my opinion, Walid Daqqa’s impact on the collective, and his resounding insistence on the potentials of psychic transformation, imprints the night sky with a northern star, fostering paths towards homeland.

ENDNOTES

1. Walid Daqqa quote translated by Abi-Ghannam, G. Naming Israel’s Psychological War on the Palestinians: Walid Daqqa’s Searing Consciousness (Or on Redefining Torture) (2004). P.8.

2. Walid Daqqa quote translated by Abi-Ghannam, G. Naming Israel’s Psychological War on the Palestinians: Walid Daqqa’s Searing Consciousness (Or on Redefining Torture) (2004). p.11

3. Walid Daqqa, “Consciousness Molded or the Re-identification of Torture” (2010), the preferred title of the study as it appears in text.

4. Lara Sheehi & Stephen Sheehi, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine, (Routledge, 2022)

5. Walid Daqqa, “Control in Time ,” Awan (2021) (tr. Marwa Farag).

6. Referencing Walid Daqqa’s article, titled “Uncle, Give Me a Cigarette” presented in Dalia Taha’s 2023 “A Place Without a Door’ and ‘Uncle Give me a Cigarette’ – Two Essays by Palestinian Political Prisoner, Walid Daqqah.

7. Walid Daqqah, “A Place Without a Door,” Middle East Research and Information Project (2023) (tr. Dalia Taha). https://merip.org/2023/07/a-place-without-a-doorand-uncle-give-me-a-cigarette-two-essays-by-palestinian-political-prisoner-walid-daqqah/

8. Alsheik, A. (2023).

Palestine Studies, Vol. 135, (tr. By Razzan Quran).

An Interview with Avgi Saketopoulou

Roula Hajjar : Thank you so much, Avgi, for being with us. And for giving us your time. We want to orient the conversation slightly to help bring you into our thinking. You know, we’re trainees. We’re students. We’re early career professionals. And there were a lot of us at the conference. We noticed it, and we think it was noticeable. Many of us are either in organizing spaces or have a history of organizing and activism in New York City. That is the audience we are considering: younger practitioners, students, trainees, people straddling the activist and intellectual, psychoanalytic spaces. With that backdrop in mind, I will situate us in this moment. We are witnessing the genocide of Palestinians by the State of Israel. We’re seeing Western governments assume a posture of unmasked fascism, and so we wonder, as students of psychoanalysis -- as people who believe in the generative and transformative promise of psychoanalysis – what psychoanalysis has to offer as not only a way to interpret or facilitate analysis but also as a tool to act on and change the social, political, material reality. And, I think in this spirit, you know, I’ll kick us off and ask: we were moved by the term “psychoanalyticopolitical” to describe the concept of exigent sadism. Can you say more about that choice?

Avgi Saketopoulou: Yes. But, can I ask? I realize I don’t know much about your background or where you’re coming from. It would be good to know a bit about that.

Safia Albaiti: Yeah. I’m Yemeni and Muslim. Before entering psychoanalysis, my entry point was through political loss through being active as a Socialist, anti-war organizing Palestine, but it also expanded from there. And so, this question of how psychoanalysis can be generative for explaining impasses, defeats, what we have as collectives, and how to articulate them…that’s something that was my entry point into the discipline. So, I’m coming a bit full circle now, but differently. I’m not as much of an organizer right now. I’m a therapist. I’m a trainee And so, this is always like part of the context.

RH: I am Lebanese; I grew up in Beirut and came to the U.S. as an adult in 2016. My parents fled the Lebanese civil war in the 70s. My family did a different thing; they moved back to Lebanon in the mid-90s after the war ended and the city was rebuilt. I was seven. So, I am somewhat of an immigrant and somewhat of a first-gen kid. I started college at the American University of Beirut in the months after the 2006 war and in a period punctuated by civil unrest and political assassinations.

Roula HAJJAR and Safia ALBAITI

Looking back it was an awful and beautiful time because it was an auspicious time. I was part of a socialist organizing community on campus that located itself within a tradition of pan-Arabism.

AS: Thank you. Part of what led me to want to know is that I realized this is a conversation between three people, the three of us coming from a part of the world that is so different from the U.S. To situate myself, I am also diasporic, being Cypriot and also being Greek. These are countries with very particular histories and geopolitical circumstances, so I’m aware of the kinds of things that we might be able to talk about or think about that may or may not be immediately experientially legible to an American reader, things that have to do with risk-taking and a willingness to act. It’s just something to keep in mind as it may inflect our conversation. So, thanks for telling me a little about your background, Safia.

To answer your question, I think psychoanalysis has much to offer toward different conceptualizations of social, political, and material reality that may enable or inspire action. I really liked your distinctively situating thinking as more than just an analysis of one’s circumstance, as your question is also about action: what might psychoanalysis offer to think about action, about acting per se? If you believe the hype, it would appear as if analysis has a difficult relationship with action —and indeed, there is some difficulty because, historically speaking, psychoanalysis has, at times, conflated action with discharge, with an inability, that is, to delay gratification or contain difficult affects, discharging them, instead into action when reflection (self-reflection, especially) might have been preferable. But, to me, it seems that it’s more accurate to say that psychoanalysis has an ambivalent relationship to action, one that is more complicated than our field is willing to claim.

I mean two things by this.

First, there are all sorts of things that psychoanalysis is doing, ways in which it is acting, even as it does not acknowledge them as action. Think, for example, about all how psychoanalysts are now at the forefront of anti-trans activism: a range of transphobic opinions are regarded as being “merely” a form of thinking. Nevertheless, this knowledge production (e.g. the idea that there are “true” transsexuals or that detransitioners are a cautionary tale that should lead us to withhold affirming healthcare from trans children) does not stand separate from action; they funnel into action (different interventions, policy decisions, etc.). I describe such positions as “knowledge production” not

because I agree with its content but to show why such “knowledge” is inseparable from action. To say this differently, this is knowledge that is conceptualized as being innocent, to use a term from Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi’s work to refer to analytic ideas that are ostensibly apolitical, to ideas that are not tied to political commitments or political positions. This sort of “innocence” is part of how action in psychoanalysis gets passed off as “thinking,” not taking a position but as reasoning or “exploration”.

Second, we should not forget that psychoanalysis actually does have a deeply developed theory of action when it comes to the clinic, which is what we call clinical technique. Strangely, we tend not to think about technique as action, as if the way that the analyst listens or intervenes is not action. Yet, all of these are actions that clinicians easily recognize as having huge implications in the consulting room. So, psychoanalysis is not as foreign to theorizing action as some might claim. The difficulty seems to have to do not with whether psychoanalysis embraces action but where, in what circumstances, and under what conditions action is seen as a legitimate purview for psychoanalysts, and whether action is reflexively taken to be about discharge to defensively avoid reflection and dynamic exploration - e.g. when a child transitions as opposed to a “watchful waiting” approach that endlessly defers transitioning to “explore” gender dynamics.

That said, actions in and outside the clinic are not the same. So, it is incumbent on us, on those of us who are interested in what analytic thinking can do outside the clinic, to do that work or, to put it more bluntly, to open up the paths in what psychoanalysis has been obstructed from doing, how it has been held back from acting in the larger world. It is incumbent on us, then, not just to name this obstruction but also to offer analytic tools for political action to take psychoanalysis in more explicitly political directions. And to do so without being afraid of the tie between psychoanalysis and politics, to not see it as something that needs to be excused or justified, but as a site of fruitful encounter and expanding possibility. Psychoanalysis teaches us so much that’s valuable about how human psyches work, about how groups operate, about motives, and how fears and anxieties inform our social lives. That’s why I described exigent sadism as a psychoanalyticopolitical concept, to situate it from the start within that sphere, to name and claim its aspiration to (I hope!) make an analytic contribution to thinking about politics, and perhaps to even be helpful in organizing.

RH: We have a follow-up question on the distinction between thought and action, as well as the clinical and the political. But let’s talk a little bit more about exigent sadism. Could you give us an autobiography of the concept? Drawing on anything that feels okay to discuss - personal, intellectual, relational, theoretical.

AS: I’ll start a little bit with a conceptual architecture of the term. Exigent sadism pairs two sets of ideas: first, a distinctive approach to sadism, and, second, the notion of exigency that comes from the work of Jean Laplanche, and which I put to the pressure of Black studies, especially Fred Moten’s work. The way I think about it, I am still in the early stages of fleshing out the concept, so there are things that I may modify or nuance as I go forward with it in the future, so our conversation is capturing the polaroid moment of my thinking about exigent sadism right now.

So, to break down the term: exigency, for Laplanche, speaks to the drivenness of the unconscious, a force that he describes as impelling us without showing us the way. I’ll say more shortly about why the part about how exigency not showing us the way is important. For him, epigrammatically, this press for movement pertains to energies that have to do with the Sexual, energies that can never be fully contained, that can never be converted in its totality into something manageable (which is what translation1 does, in his model). Crucially, the Sexual is not the same as sexuality per se, it is tantamount, instead, to the unconscious and is polymorphously perverse. It is also the result of primal repression; in fact, he says that it results from the failure of repression. My intervention starts there, to say that it is only from the ego’s perspective that we would be warranted to describe the errancy of the unconscious as a failure; it is only a failure, in other words, if the goal is to fully master the disturbance of the enigmatic. Borrowing the term and theorization of “fugitivity” from Black studies, from Fred Moten especially, I argue that if seen not from the ego’s viewpoint but from a different vantage point, the fact that the unconscious can never be fully culled by translation, that it can never be fully contained through representation, is not a failure but part of what makes it, ontologically speaking, always fugitive. There is always a measure of energy that escapes the ordering operations of translation, a refusal, if you will, to be regulated through existing social codes and how these are formed and conducted through the parent. This escape is not a failure but a potentiality.

And since the unconscious is also about the Sexual, polymorphous perversity and drivenness, I want to also say something here about why the shift away from seeing the fugitivity of the unconscious as a failure

(of containment) can be so generative. In Western political philosophy, the sexual has always been seen as something that threatens to interfere with the capacity to form and sustain societies, as a dangerous distraction of the citizenry from collective social bonds, political debate, and work. The unconscious is sexual, and it is unruly and hostile to the rational operations of building a society and a state apparatus. Part of what I find problematic about this kind of severing of the unconscious from the political is that there is always an “uncivilized” quality to the sexual, there’s always an element in us that cannot be put to work and which cannot be dominated. I put uncivilized in scare quotes because I don’t use civilization here in thinking about civilizational projects, racist agendas, or colonial investments but with respect and appreciation for what can emerge from that which escapes the organizing ordering forces of “civilization”. We can think of it as untamed, as feral (per Griffin Hansbury), as the undisciplined (per Amber Musser), as the disordered (per Oliver Davis and Tim Dean). I am interested in the political possibilities of thinking with the unconscious precisely because it, by its nature, escapes -energetically resists, we might say- social ordering. From therein, our capacity to resist what the State wants for and from us, what is good for capitalism or production, and what is good for the accumulation of wealth or the protection of private property arises. That there are forces in us that can never be tamed is not something to be frightened of, it’s the site of a possible otherwise. Exigency, then, has to do with drivenness, with a non-subjective nerveless determination that, as I said earlier, does not show us the way, does not impel us to act this or that way. It is this drivenness and non-subjectiveness that gives exigency its sovereign character.

Let me now get to the second word, sadism. Sadism is nowadays flattened from its more dimensional original meaning: mostly desexualized, sadism is now often used as a synonym for barbarism or excessive cruelty. But its original meaning, sourced from the work of the Marquis de Sade, refers to the inseparable coalition between the sexual and the destructive.

In Sexuality Beyond Consent, I fleshed out different forms of sadism, opening up the fan of sadisms, plural, to think about different currents of sadistic impulse. I have been interested in forms of sadism that move us away from the exercise of one’s will over another, a destructive sadism, where one aims to control the other, to annex the other’s psyche, life, property, land, and so on. And then there’s a rather different kind of sadism, that I call “sensible sadism,” that pertains to BDSM practice where sadism becomes mimetic, where a top, for example,

acts as if they don’t care for the other person when that theatricality is, in fact, something that the other person has agreed to so the action stays within certain agreed-upon bounds (known as hard limits). Sensible sadism has the appearance of sadism; it may even have the paraphernalia —material and/ or linguistic—of sadism, but it’s as-if, not a true engagement of sadism.

Exigent sadism differs from destructive and sensible sadism. It is also extracted from the sadomasochistic constellation in the sense that sadism is not the active form, whereas masochism is the passive one. This is because exigent sadism is neither active nor passive but involves, instead, the sadist’s passibility, which is a vulnerability, a dispossession. I use the word “dispossession” not in how it’s used when we talk about the dispossession of land or property but in the sense of recognizing that there exist forces in ourselves we’re not in control of. I don’t just mean this in the sense of being, say, unaware of one’s own motivations, but in the sense of the untamable, anarchic forces I was referring to earlier, forces that are impersonal (aka, not driven by defense, relationality, or motive), forces that are not plugged into the self-preservative instinct. Exigent sadism retains the connection with the Sexual, not in the sense of sexual sadism per se, but in maintaining the tie between the polymorphousness of the sexual body. That means pleasure and ruthlessness partake in it, sometimes even cruelty; cruelty here is not about harming the other for one’s pleasure but is also directed at risking the self (which is not masochism). It is the Sexual’s fugitivity that confers upon the sexual drive a quality of resistance to being conducted through translation, that is, through established systems of representation. From a Foucauldian perspective, the sexual drive is resistant to being governed in any certain way by systems of meaning-making—that is, also, by systems of power, as the two can’t always be neatly distinguished - a resistance to be conducted this or that way by the State (e.g. when the State tells you that you have to pick between two genders), by our institutions (e.g. when an analytic institute tell us that we are splitting when protesting a genocide), even by our object relations (e.g. by how our objects are inculcated into systems of belief, structures of feelings, trailed by clouds of pressure, influence.) The Sexual, we might say, is where the source of the psyche’s capacity to resist power is rooted.

RH: How can we understand how exigent sadism can be wielded? The drive for sovereignty can also be wielded by fascism and is often enabled by powerful actors in that quest for destruction. For example, in Lara Sheehi’s formulation of settler colonial outposts. Your argument seems to be an invitation to what is generative and revolutionary

about exigent sadism. And that we choose to reject that at our own risk, so to speak.

AS: I should clarify first that I am not speaking about a drive for sovereignty. In the way I am using the term, sovereignty is not a state to be accomplished nor a masterful possession of self-sovereignty, which is the point of exigent sadism. It is, instead, the drive itself that has a sovereign quality and that is guaranteed by its fugitivity, by the fact that the enigmatic is sentenced by its very nature to escape the translational forms that try to master and dominate it. In that sense, exigent sadism is not self-righteous (as is the case with fascism or settler colonial outposts), and it also involves a certain vulnerability for the sadist herself. In that sense, exigent sadism is not the purview of the one with social or interpersonal power, power positionality is delinked from the exercise of exigent sadism. And because it is operated by the sexual drive, which is energetically anarchic, exigent sadism is not something that can be embraced or instrumentalized, it involves entering into an adventure with oneself and with the other, risking the breakdown of one’s own ego and creating space that may engender the breakdown of that of the other’s as well.

This is where the revolutionary potential you mentioned enters the picture. The generation of new psychic energy and fresh possibilities arises precisely in the crevasses of our egos’ breakdown. Such breakdown is not pleasant but anguishing, yet rejecting exigent sadism risks rejecting our revolutionary potential. However, the process is not as conscious as this phrasing may make it sound. Oftentimes, this is because we are so eager to respond to the fear that we will lose those to whom we want to remain connected, which is why exigent sadism is so closely tied with a willingness to do what is necessary even when that includes breaking relations, parting ways with groups or organizations. I don’t mean this in a facile way, as if relationships are a dime a dozen or expendable: no, we need other people, we need connections and social bonds, they are constitutive of so much that’s important in our lives. Plus, losing connections hurts tremendously. And I certainly don’t mean it in the sense of someone leveraging a relationship to get one’s way to control another. Exigent sadism, rather, gives us the sovereign impetus to bend our will, to resist the powerful seductions of even belonging to a group, of existing within a system or an organization, in short, to be in relation come what may.

I emphasize this because there’s an unspoken, deep taboo in psychoanalysis against breaking relations even when those harm us: notions of splitting, dialogue, Benjamin’s notion of the Third, all these participate in deterring us from breaking from

those who harm us. This taboo ties us to our circumstances and obviates revolutionary potential. Exigent sadism does some pathclearing work towards that end; it begins a discussion about the vicissitudes of breaking relations. Even though in the consulting room, we often try to think about what keeps patients in bad relationships, we don’t have theorizing regarding the breaking of relationships. We are implicitly encouraged to believe that relationships must be preserved at all costs.

And, to go back to the other element of your question: it is absolutely true that there are forms of sadism that settler colonialism that fascism also partakes in. But I would argue that the sadism that tries to control another, to control an outcome, that tries to subordinate another person’s will, that tries to harness their labor or to appropriate their sexuality or put energy to a certain kind of use, to use them as chattel, as objects, or as extensions of oneself, sadism that unspools in these directions is no longer exigent. Certainly, it can be sadistic, but it’s a different kind of sadism than the one I have in mind. The distinctive characteristic of exigent sadism is that it doesn’t try to will oneself over another; it also has to do with one’s self-sovereignty. Here, sovereignty is not about the effort to lord oneself over somebody else. It’s about maintaining one’s sense of one’s separateness and one’s own presence in the world, in our connections with our history and our connections with what matters to us.

If it is going to generate action, exigent sadism will eventually have to combine with something else (remember that exigency does not show us the direction), but the point I am making is that because exigent sadism retains the ties of resistance to being appropriated it may, thus, also protect the subject’s critical faculties, allowing her to consider alternate paths of action, including paths that break with another or with a group. Think, for example, of all the obedience studies from Zimbardo’s prison experiment, Milgram’s research on obedience to authority, to Asch’s conformity experiments. To distance yourself from your peers and exercise your critical faculty, to judge for yourself, requires a certain willingness to break ranks, and that involves a sadism towards one’s self, risk how you are perceived, and risk disconnect. To put it more crisply, exigent sadism is not a different term for ethics but the condition under which an ethical stance may emerge amidst conditions that call for conformity, whether these conditions are about obeying the State, fearfully acquiescing to a university that prohibits the use of the word genocide, or risking displeasing a lover or your parent. Exigent sadism is not a synonym for good politics - it is not on the side of Palestine or of resisting transphobia—but, instead, the source

energy to fall out of line with your objects of attachment, including (and perhaps especially) objects that make your connection to them contingent on your obedience. To put this differently, exigent sadism is how we remain enduringly available to the fugitivity in ourselves.

The reason why I said earlier that this sort of sadism involves sovereignty is that it requires one to push back against oneself before one pushes back against any other (individual or institution), to forgo one’s own tendency to keep things stable for oneself, to not cause a disturbance to oneself or to the other, to not be put in the position where somebody’s going to call you- as in Sara Ahmed’s notion of the “feminist killjoy” (citation needed) - a troublemaker, accusations that women, racialized subjects and queer people are often saddled with. It’s always easier to stay put or to contain one’s resistance or disagreement within rational terms; to not act, that is (and to return us to the earlier part of our conversation), but to hope that the other can be convinced by rational arguments, that action -including revolutionary action- can wait until we have secured everyone’s consensus.

Since Kant, the idea of wooing the other through logic has always been the means of negotiating societies’ decisions about political action. What this misses is that logic is not the only factor bearing on “convincing” people that libidinal investment and personal interests are not soluble in logic. This is how we end up in the endless molasses of dialogue, where talking and debating become a delaying tactic; whether it is intended to do that or not is beside the point, the point is that this is how endless debate ends up operating, by constant deferral. Much psychoanalytic theory works this way too, when it comes to thinking politics; Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi have fleshed out very compellingly in their book how splitting and accusations of acting out are leveled against anyone who trespasses this, who dares to break ranks. It is important for clinicians to know that these ideas also have deep roots in political theory, especially in Western political philosophy.

RH: You said something about pushing against the self. Safia and I, while considering the conference in its aftermath, were feeling, as racialized, minoritized individuals, as two Arab women, one of whom is hijabi, that there was safety, or at least the illusion of safety at the conference. So we were comfortable, to an extent. But we were wondering, is there something about the conference space being too comfortable? You know using this idea that the reparative stabilizes and the crisis transforms. Was disruption that was meant to be more generative get blunted by this sort of manic harmony within the community, too much welcome, too much acceptance, too

little tension? We called it, you know, like a “Kumbaya” enactment. So, I wonder what you think of that.

AS: I think that’s a great question. For minoritized people especially, the experience of being in a safer space can be extremely powerful for obvious reasons. I certainly understand and respect the feeling of relief that comes with that, the respite from having to be constantly on the defensive-I am not Arab, but I am a queer immigrant including from a Middle Eastern country, so I have my version of that experience. And I know how extremely seductive that is, how those spaces especially are spaces where one does not want to disturb things.

Being in such spaces is something I enjoy, but I am also cautious about it because, in my opinion, it can artificially homogenize differences. Moving away from Div. 39 for a moment, I personally feel weary of collectives where too much enthusiasm and self-congratulation reigns, collectives that don’t have apparent tensions. I am thinking, for example, of what happened with the Dyke March in NY in this year’s Pride celebrations. On the one hand, you have dykes who are trying to create space for different forms of queer experience for different kinds of gendered subjects who fall under the category of dyke. But the “safety” of that space cracks open when they put out an ambivalent statement about Palestine, reassuring about the “safety” of Jewish dykes at the march, and when they announce that the march will be fully masked (in consideration for those with compromised immune systems, and to protect from covid spread) but don’t follow through on the masking requirement. We see here the fault lines appear, and it causes a crisis: in my opinion, this is a good thing, even if the organization were to fracture, even if people were to leave and start something new because it is these actions (not the kumbaya enactment, as you and Safia called it) that surfaces the real differences, that reminds us that a shared identity (in this case, being a dyke, in yours of being Arab women, in the case of Div 39 having pro-Palestine attendees) does not guarantee shared politics.

I am not speaking here about the narcissism of small differences. Still, rather about really substantive distinctions –in the case of the Dyke March, it was about where dykes stand on genocide, where they stand on disability rights. So, personally, homogeneity makes me anxious because it may cover over politically substantive disagreements and because it cultivates the fantasy that these are spaces that are clean of, say, anti-Arab sentiment or homotransphobic attitudes. For me, this is the more painful but more accurate and true, and in that sense, perhaps exigently sadistic position to take vis-à- vis minoritized experience.

At Div 39, you may remember, somebody in the Q&A was asking me a question

about my talk and said, as a matter of course, something like, “ok, all of us here agree on these politics,” and I said to that person that I thought that “agreeing on these politics” is of very little value, that things get more substantive when we go from nodding one’s head in agreement to actually taking a stance, to taking action. I told her that if push comes to shove to stand by the things we all agree on, most of the people in that room of 800 attendees would stay silent. This is the other key feature of exigent sadism, which also makes the exigent sadist vulnerable: it costs you. You might make people not want to be around you, you might injure relationships, hurt the feelings of those who want you to think or act differently, lose that Kumbaya feeling, you might miss out on referrals, you might damage your career prospects.

I’m not saying this as if to say, you know what, you should just throw all of that away, or without recognizing their cost. Every subject has to come to accept that cost for themselves, and I say “accept” because I don’t think one consciously decides to be exigently sadistic. I think one sometimes just has to accept that about themselves, to accept that there is no other way than to follow the exigency of what draws them to resist. Even as that sentiment can eventually be coated with pride or even enthusiasm, stepping into one’s exigent sadism is more something one gives oneself over to rather than something one controls. I would even say there is a certain kind of relinquishment, a divestment from oneself. Divestment here is meant as a libidinal divestment from our translations, from the fantasy of safety or even of self-preservation of our ego, what I have elsewhere called ‘overwhelm,” and the risking of the self. In that sense, exigent sadism takes one into something unpredictable; you risk so much without being able to know, anticipate, or control the outcome. But you do it because you have to because nothing else will do

RH: You invoked this sort of Kantian promise of reason and rational persuasion. As trainees, Safia and I are entrenched in this world of theory and professional psychoanalytic language, frameworks and approaches, etc. And that helps organize learning. We also spoke earlier about legibility. I think this language and the way it is deployed renders others legible to us and us legible to others.

But then there’s this critique of reason and rationality as a mechanism to flatten, tame, and domesticate psyches and subjectivities. There’s a tension between the turning towards reason and the turning towards passion. This tension has its own valuation and costs for students and people earlier in their training within institutions, particularly around the question of legitimacy and credibility. What do you think of that?

Exigent sadism is more interested in what happens when someone stays more present with the wound; this is one way to think about what it means to be suspended between the two vines. To stay in the wound, to stay awake and alive to what has happened, to what is still happening, to not be seduced by the fantasy that it can be repaired, put in the past where it can stop oozing. Many of us, including many of our patients, would rather turn away from that – and the way to turn away from it is through the notion of the reparative, which nourishes the hope that one can get over things, leave them behind by processing them

AS: I would frame this slightly differently than the tension between reason and passion —I am not necessarily talking about passion. For me, the tension is between what reason can accomplish (and it can and does accomplish things) and the fact it cannot accomplish as much as is promised. This is because other factors that have to do with libidinality and psychic investment are at stake, and these are not things that can be managed through reason or explained away through exegesis. So, to stay with your question about training for a moment: first off, I have not yet written about exigent sadism in the consulting room, and I can’t emphasize enough how different clinical thinking informed by exigent sadism is from thinking it in the domain of the political. But as clinicians, and as trainees especially, it’s important to remember that, even as psychoanalysis often boasts its comfort with the irrational, most versions of psychoanalysis today are quite invested in converting the irrational into something rational based on history, dynamics, identifications, relational patterns, and so on. In this way of thinking, latent content is the decoding of the manifest. If, to use Barnaby Barat’s terms, we treat the unconscious as if it pertained to reading a text behind a text, then we miss out on the incommensurability between these two different systems (of the conscious and

the unconscious), their different energetic regimes, and the fact that psychic time is neither chronological nor linear.

I am not saying this to argue that symbolism is to be wholeheartedly discarded, but only to highlight that an exclusive valuation or overvaluation of such psychoanalytic approaches leaves out and even demonizes the anarchy of the sexual drive. And it perpetuates the ideology that reason offers solutions to clinical problems. A psychoanalysis that is overinvested in just giving us the key to unlock the irrational and turn it into something rational and more legible to us misses that there is an inescapable tension between the psychic organization of conscious life and of reason and the operations of the Sexual, of the unconscious. At this particular moment in time, I think that an overly zealous analytic approach to identity does some of that work, that is, of imagining that the unconscious is comprehensible, if only with the right tools, that the unconscious is a warehouse of intolerable feelings or experiences, or of incompatible ideas. I feel I should immediately now clarify that legibility is no small thing, nor am I dismissing its value: it can give us a way of being in the world and a way of being recognized. Identity categories are critical to making claims for oneself, advocating for one’s group, and petitioning for one’s rights. But this can also degrade into a form of instrumental reason, as when a clinician asks a supervisor “how to treat a trans person” or “how to work with a Black patient” —as if there is a compendium of techniques to address these complex clinical matters. But if identity is not ontological (and I can’t go into this in length here), it means that as clinicians, we need to be able to think beyond identity, beyond the roadmaps our training gives us (or does not, in the case of minoritarian experience!). Such roadmaps are not useless, but you can’t take them at face value. When Ann Pellegrini and I wrote Gender Without Identity, we didn’t write it to say it doesn’t matter how you identify as it doesn’t have an impact in the world or it doesn’t have an impact on your relationships. Of course, it does. But we use the term without identity to push against the developing fantasy in psychoanalysis that addressing, say, psychoanalysis’s entrenched homotransphobia, will come naturally through an “understanding” of what gender is, of what transness is.

SA: And there’s something about identities, there’s almost like a never-ending pressure toward legitimacy. To be legible once you’re in this identity and you want to be, want to belong. You’re always reconstituting legibility and power.

AS: Yeah. And the more you’re reconstituting, the more power transforms; it comes

at identity from another angle. Resisting it can also mean being outside legibility. And I mean, we see this. I’m thinking about a trans patient that I work with. When I started working with them, they were identifying as non-binary. And now they’re identifying as trans non-binary. Now, almost every trans person will have a different definition of what trans non-binary means or what non-binary means. You can say you can always go by your patient’s definition – and, of course, we should not antagonize our patients. But, still, there’s always something fugitive, an escape from the confines of identity and the way it tries to fully account for a subject. Of course, not everyone welcomes that, both theoretically and personally. Many people would rather belong to or be fully subsumed by a category; in some cases (of oppression and persecution), that can be about emotional survival and actual survival, while in others, it can be about being an overly sclerotic ego. But my point is that there’s always a part of us that is resistant to being captured, even as capture may at times even feel relieving. This is the tension to which you were speaking earlier, Roula, and fugitivity may be seen—metapsychologically speaking—from the viewpoint of the unconscious as a refusal, and this is related to the point that you were making, Safia, about refusing the privileges that come with legibility.

RH: I was even thinking that in your keynote. I think, for folks like us, you know, or I’ll speak for myself, there’s a relief when another theory came to us, through you, that we don’t have to repair because there is, as you’ve said so often, this push that to be a subject that can and wants to repair is a professional and mature and social subject. Not that there was a theory contending otherwise, I felt a sense of relief. Now it’s not just a visceral, senseless motivation, a reactive anger guiding behavior to sever or move away. Now, I can explain my feelings using theory. You use this metaphor of leaving one vine, and you talk about suspension. But for me personally, it’s seductive to know that there was something else I was going grab onto, another theoretical orientation, which is not, I think, what we’re talking about when we think of exigency. In exigency, there’s no way. We don’t know the way. We don’t know much about the next vine.

AS: Indeed, I have been very critical of the notion of repair for some time now. In the keynote, I spoke about how the depressive position especially operates as an accouterment to a psychoanalytic doxa that centers relationality in ways that champion the preservation of relations, come what may. Psychoanalytic theory has conditioned us to accept repair as the apex of psychic maturity, firmly orienting us towards accepting others’ reparative gestures, however insincere or hollow they may be, of staying in relation,

no matter the cost. The reparative, however, dampens sexual energies that fuel our willingness to act when necessary and to divest from relationships that harm us-it is part of how the taboo on severing relations that we discussed earlier is constituted.

Oftentimes, when I discuss my critiques of repair, I am asked whether we have to jettison repair, why not just nuance it, surely some reparative models are worth salvaging. First off, I don’t think repair is going anywhere, it has too tight of a grip on hope -and we do need to be able to think about how one comes back from a rupture -though, for me, transformation rather than repair is a more worthwhile path. Most importantly, I am always interested in how quickly colleagues who feel interested in my critique of repair get anxious about how to repair repair. If repair is shown to be a problem (in the way I lay out), isn’t the rush to repair repair itself indexical of how quickly we move in to repair the aggressor, which is one of David Eng’s critique of repair? Again, I don’t think repair will be thrown out entirely, but if I make the reparative my critical targe it is precisely to alert us to the impulse to protect repair and the conceptual architecture that subtends it.

So, to loop back to your question, thinking with exigency and against the reparative is indeed not about having a guaranteed substitute solid place to land to. The metaphor you are referring to was about how risking the self (overwhelm), may feel to be beyond someone’s affordances. I said that in real time this can feel like being suspended mid-air, after one has let go of one vine propelling oneself forward, but before a next one has appeared. This is a risk in the order of what Marquis Bey has described as “thinking and living in excess of our present conditions”. I owe the metaphorical image of the vines to my colleague, Karen Melikian, and I use it because it’s doubly powerful.

First, it conveys how the sense of being in midair is unnerving, but does not necessarily mean you’re falling—though, of course, there is no guarantee, the leap is a true risk. For example, if you try to address something problematic in your psychoanalytic Institute, in a relationship, and they are unwilling to truly engage (I am not talking about the perfunctory, “yes, we want your feedback,” etc.), it might not turn out well. You may, of course, be bringing it up out of naivete, without knowing that, DEI initiatives aside, organizations are rarely committed to redistributing power, but if not, you are doing it because you’re accepting that you can’t do anything else, because you are refusing to live by these conditions.

Second, this metaphor captures something about the necessary movement, the propelling into something else. My critique of repair is connected to this. We know that

there is no way really to return to a pre-traumatized state, and while the reparative does not claim this, it absolutely cultivates the fantasy that there is the way to return to a prelapsarian self, to a pre-traumatic self. Repair, in this sense, overpromises: for example, when we say things like, “I thought my patient had worked through x trauma, but when she got in y situation, it all came back,” we are betraying that we do, in fact, believe that a trauma can be worked through such that its psychic become eliminated.

By contrast, exigent sadism is more interested in what happens when someone stays more present with the wound; this is one way to think about what it means to be suspended between the two vines. To stay in the wound, to stay awake and alive to what has happened, to what is still happening, to not be seduced by the fantasy that it can be repaired, put in the past where it can stop oozing. Many of us, including many of our patients, would rather turn away from that – and the way to turn away from it is through the notion of the reparative, which nourishes the hope that one can get over things, leave them behind by processing them.

Staying with the wound is not easy, for so many reasons, and this is another aspect of what makes exigent sadism difficult for the sadist. If exigent sadism opens up the possibility of divestment, by which I mean libidinally divesting from relationships, from organizations, even from the notion that one can be restored to a time before trauma, that means that we have to be willing to go at it alone, to look for new comrades and affiliations. But the hurt of having had to divest, never leaves you; it’s a wound that can always reopen and this is not something to be afraid of, it’s part of what it means to be alive.

RH: Yes, separating or leaving the relationship, you can still be very much still invested in it. You can still be emotionally bound. You alluded to this earlier and you’ve said the clinical application is not something that you’ve advanced sufficiently to perhaps want to talk about. But one thing that you did say at the conference, at the Gender without identity book talk, was that we must accept the incommensurability of the social, political with the clinical, lest the clinical work be degraded, and I think you were saying degraded into a political education. So, I was wondering how does the deployment of psychoanalyticopolitical concepts, to use your phrase, clinically come up against this challenge of incommensurability.

AS: Yeah. I think the reason why I’m emphasizing so much the vulnerability of the exigent sadist, and how exigency is not about exercising one’s will is because you also cannot enter the clinical situation imagining that

exigent sadism will give you a way to talk to your patients about politics the way we talk about them in the public square. If somebody doesn’t want to talk about their racism, for example, forcing them to do (e.g. by constantly interpreting it) is not a clinically sound path – and not only because it might threaten a rupture. You have to be able to see how that ripples into their life, how it manifests in the transference. And while you wait, you are vulnerable as a clinician, which I think is part of what we sign up for as therapists.

As you know, I am one of those analysts who believes that the political very much belongs in the consulting room. But it doesn’t belong in the consulting in the same way it belongs in the pedagogical context of a classroom. Our patients always get to say, “I’m not interested in that,” and it is then our job to be thinking of defenses, of what the disinterest is about, what it protects and what it enables. I think that defense interpretations are always easier (more obvious and, at times, more effective) than interpretations of libidinal investment (when you might, for example, show a patient her privilege and how committed she is to preserving it). So, this work happens obliquely, not head on, and like all clinical work it is always at the border of the patient’s consent I can’t go into this here but it’s an idea I’ve developed in Sexuality Beyond Consent but, briefly, if we just stayed away from whatever our patients say they can’t or won’t talk about, the work would not go very far; it would commence, but in the words of Jay Greenberg, it might not launch. To work on the border of the patient’s consent is also to provide a measure of support, and that recognizes that the political does not necessarily appear in the consulting room as politics, which is not to say that politics do not belong in the consulting room. If, for example, one cannot be talked out of one’s racism or one’s Zionism - and I firmly believe that to be true - the work proceeds not by linking (making interpretations and connections) but by what comes undone, through overwhelm and through the undoing of links. This is an anguishing process for the patient and also for the therapist, it’s not reparative work it’s transformative work, and it’s much better than a patient who’s able to parrot back something that their therapist wants to hear, or some good political slogan. We might, then, loop back to what we were talking about earlier in discussing divestment, because the kind of divestment I am speaking to is not just divesting from another person, you yourself come undone, divesting your libidinal bonds between representations, which is what self-transformation also means. If, for example, one’s racism gets transformed through an analytic treatment, this does not happen in a surgically targeted way, as if that piece is changed while

every else remains untouched everything in the psyche; to use Dominique Scarfone’s term, [the ego] has to be dis-membered and then be re-membered, one comes undone. The sense of overwhelm I have theorized is very much about that, about the fact that no one surrenders their libidinal ties eagerly – ties that bind together the self, ties that bind us to others, to ideals, to organizations, to parties, and so on (remember Freud, from Mourning and Melancholia, “it is a matter of general observation that people never willingly abandon a libidinal position”). In the keynote I quoted a poem by Constantinos Kavafis, where he talks about how he who wants to grow their spirit has to accept that half the house will have to come down. The house that has to come down is you; the exigent sadist is exquisitely vulnerable because she becomes dispossessed from her own self. Clinically speaking this is not something the analyst does to the patient, the analyst merely facilitates the circumstances for it. The stakes and ethical commitments of clinical work are obviously different than how we live our political lives outside the consulting room, which, again, is not to say that politics do not belong in the consulting room. I’m curious as you’re hearing me say this, as younger clinicians, how does this sound to you?

SA: I mean, I can say for myself, I think going back to experiences I’ve had, I used to think about divesting from organizations that I was a part of… the way I made sense of it psychologically, was like Antigone, right? I kind of in some way buried a part of myself and had to move to something else which was like being a professional clinician. But, actually, in rethinking this myself, there’s an exigent sadism that was a part of it. It was a choice that was generative. Hard, but generative, and brought out a different part of me. I have a better grounding, maybe. I lost something, sure. But I gained something, too. So, when I think about the idea of how to do political work in the consulting room. I think that patients appreciate how you’re modeling your reactions as well.

And it’s a practice of a politics of selfdetermination. If you believe that in yourself, it comes to inform how you approach your patient. You kind of want your patient to appreciate you politically, because they’ve seen it in practice. Which, I think is a different approach than a kind of a pedagogical one of politically educating your patient.

AS: Yeah, what you’re saying is so great because the question of what it means to have this present in yourself when you’re working clinically, is, I think, another very good way of putting it. Patients will have all kinds of reactions to that in their therapist—and

they may sense it even when their therapist’s actions are not known to them. And while yes “modeling” is one way to think about it, it’s important to be aware that it can also generate anger, competitiveness, fear. The sense of self-sovereignty we are talking about can also incite envy, because it’s a really strong position that not everyone is willing to risk. In the consulting room, those are all things that you’ll have to deal with in the transference, and that’s another big difference with political life and organizing. Not in the sense that there’s no transference in the latter (there most certainly is) but your position is different and thus, also, your responsibilities and your handling of it. When you’re sitting with a patient who’s been vulnerable with you, whom you have known for some time, even someone very angry or hostile, someone overtly racist or sexist, you can also listen for and discern the vulnerabilities inhering in these [missing word?]—and we have a different responsibility in relation to these kinds of affects in the clinic than we do in our personal lives and in our political life. This is one of the things that makes exigent sadism categorically different in the clinical realm.

RH: I think maybe a few days after October 7th, we had group supervision. Safia and I were there, and we were speaking about locating where we were at that moment. As people but also as clinicians. And I said that I really didn’t know what to do if a Zionist patient said something vicious to me. I genuinely couldn’t think of what I would do or what options were available to me. Because the ways that I’ve been trained to respond would not feel…authentic. It’s not even so much that I want to teach at that moment. It’s more that I don’t want to abandon something, a sincere position. So, I could ignore, I could dissociate, I could move on. But none of these options would feel sincere enough. It was a simple but also difficult question, and I don’t know, Safia, if you agree, but I don’t think we really know how to proceed. And it is not like I expect or even want someone to write a sort of a protocol for us to follow, but just a space to think about what is ethical in moments like those is helpful.

SA: I mean, I remember that conversation because it made me think about Lacan’s short session and cutting at that moment.

AS: That sounds to me like a theoretical out.

RH: That’s exactly it; it’s a theoretical out.

AS: When I said it’s a theoretical out, I meant that it’s a way of using the theory to give the therapist an out but I don’t think that this is how the variable length session is

supposed to work, to give the therapist a break from a patient. So I have so many thoughts about what you are raising, about the question of how we might respond when a patient comes in and says something very aggressive or provocative or even that harms us.

To me, the worry about not being authentic is less about transparency—there are all kinds of things we are not transparent about with our patients - but more a question of what to do with that feeling, what to make of it and what do with it. For example, a patient who is talking about something that is very violent, that touches something that is meaningful to you personally, who knows they are speaking to their Arab therapist in a way that might hurt or threaten, is different than a patient who is talking hatefully about a genocide to someone they think is “neutral.” One of the differences is that these may pertain to different transference configurations.

For me, in the way that I work and supervise, authenticity feels like a very vexed issue. I am obviously not advocating for being inauthentic, but, for one, real and ongoing authenticity would expose the patient to all kinds of things that may not be about the patient’s treatment but about us, or the timing may be not ripe to bring them up, etc. Of course, I am not saying that if you have a Zionist and your family is being murdered in Palestine, you just have to keep it together, because you’re the clinician here. In such circumstances, you may indeed reach your limits, and we do as clinicians have limits. But part of our work’s ruthelessness (for the clinician) is that we also try to stay present for what the patient is bringing in (e.g other affects dressed up as Zionism might be the – dysfunctional - way in which a patient introduces things they are afraid of in themselves, e.g. their capacity for hatred). So, ideally, there needs to be some room, between feeling intensely about what the patient is saying to me and immediately going to termination.

I am not saying that termination should be off the table always and categorically. Once in my practice, I have had to terminate with an analytic patient several years into the treatment because I felt so abused by them that I could no longer be useful to them. But I want to be honest that I also terminated because, though I had a sense of the dynamics driving the abusive behavior, I personally could no longer bear how they were treating me, it was affecting me too much for my own well-being. This was a 4 times weekly treatment, and the termination happened after many years of work together, which I mention because I want to emphasize that I am not somebody who believes that as a clinician you should take anything, nor that we are in the consulting room to be treated as punching bags, and that such decisions should not be made on the spot. And while I named

the dynamics in bringing up termination, I also owned my own incapacity: I had simply reached the limits of what I could metabolize, and that was a limitation in me, in what I could sustain for this patient.

So there are exceptions in extreme cases, and the situation you described, Safia, could conceivably prove to be such a case. But being a clinician involves trying to bracket some of our reactions to reflect on what’s unfolding: for example, there’s a difference between somebody coming in with Zionist rhetoric because that’s their way to get under your skin -that requires one kind of clinical responsethan if somebody’s coming in because they have grown up all their lives, being told there was nobody in Palestine, that the land was promised to Jewish people and who may be in the process of realizing or might, through the treatment as well as other factors, come to realize that they’ve been lied to. And that’s different, again, from somebody who learns this history but is unfazed by it, and feels entitled to the “promised land” and to speaking to you about it without concern for its implications for you. These are already three – and there’s many more variations —distinctive places for a patient. But if we can’t suspend our feelings long enough to find out, we will never know. Ideally, one has a supervisor to consult, an analyst or therapist of one’s own, to discuss this with. I say to supervisees all the time, come and talk about these things in supervision, talk about them with your analyst, it can help you figure out what belongs in the therapeutic relationship and how. Sometimes you actually have to sit on it for quite a bit before you have a sense of where it’s coming from and what it is about. Is it defensive? Is it a repetition and if so, of what? How are you getting embroiled in it transferentially? If you immediately go to authenticity, you’re missing out on all of these opportunities, though –and this is something that needs to be said and is not said enough in training—sticking around to find out is not without pain or anguish for us. Sometimes, most of the times I think, we find ways to work with such patients, we also clarify our own feelings, our own transferences and countertransferences; at other times, and this I think is more of the exception, something may be too unbearable for us and we need to stop. The decision is ultimately yours, though having the help of a supervisor and an analyst is important. How is this sounding to you?

RH: This is very helpful. And, I think, highlights the need for good supervision. Which I believe I have. At the end of the day, patients are coming to us. It’s not a personal relationship. What I feel wary of is when the patient comes in the next day and the next day and the next day…watching myself start to hide a mug or hide a shirt, or hide a kaffiyeh.

What’s happening for me, and all to say that’s material, probably, to navigate for myself.

AS: Yes. If you are moved to move your kuffiyeh out of the way, you’re going to want to think about why: are you afraid of the patient’s aggression, are you worried that you will lose the patient’s idealization, are you afraid that they will unthinkingly identify with you when they don’t, in fact, share your politics, are you trying to sidestep the transference in some way? If this is connected to a dynamic issue (e.g. a Jewish patient is too afraid that confronting the genocide would cause a rupture with their family), are there ways to take your insight (about why you’d want to hide your kuffiyeh) and bring it into the session, a way that might generate less resistance and which might find your patient’s own ambivalence rather colluding with them in projecting it into you? And there are questions of timing: if your patient was just diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, you might balance things differently. And you have to trust in repetition, that things will come up again. There are so many things to consider about such moments, so what you were saying about supervision is so important. I’m glad you have that space. I wish everybody would.

SA: I am thinking about how many experiences we’ve heard of the reverse. Of analysts who were more Zionist, who preempted or said something about their inability to hold space for their patients and the need to terminate after years of work with pro-Palestine patients. And that’s actually more of the stories that I’m hearing.

AS: Absolutely.

SA: And there’s no space to discuss this in the field. Right? Less so.

AS: Indeed. I, too, have heard these stories so many times, and so many times from people who are heartbroken. Heartbroken because they didn’t realize that their analyst was Zionist, and are all of a sudden encountering in a person they deeply trusted, someone would by-stand a genocide. And then there’s the other angle, that so many people have had the experience of their analyst not being able to manage their affect and stay with their patient’s material, to not have their concern about the genocide be met with a “but, Hamas” kind of response, or with a “what about Israeli suffering?” reactivity, analysts who are beginning to have conversations that are meant to try and convert their patients, intended to suppress the patient’s reality and the patient’s emotional experience.

RH: What we’re talking about reminds me of exigency because when I was having

that interaction with my patient, what was most disturbing, truly, if I’m to think about it, was myself. You know, my feathers were ruffled, I was feeling an interior turbulence. I think we expect something of ourselves… not to feel…as a commitment to neutrality. There’s this posture of being really steady and settled. And, now that I wasn’t any of those things, I was afraid of myself. I’m feeling a strong charge, the energy is moving in a certain way. What we’re saying is that’s not something to be afraid of, or it is, I guess, something to be afraid of.

AS: What you just said, Roula, is very powerful because it’s true that some of these feelings may scare us, their intensity may frighten us, catch us off guard. It does not help that we are trained to expect that while yes, we may experience some feelings, these are not too intense, and if subjected to selfanalysis (or supervisory conversation) they will wane in intensity. Erotic countertransferences are an excellent example, because they can feel so heated, so unlike anything that resembles how our literature languages erotic affect where it’s often described in more lukewarm terms rather than the full force of feeling heatedly drawn to or even in love with a patient. The fright we feel about the intensity of our responses to patients can then galvanize a distancing from the patient, or a projection to the patient, attributing to them an intention to frighten us. Of course, we always need to think about what the patient is contributing, what the patient may be non-consciously trying to provoke in the analyst. By the way, I have been using the word analyst here in a very expansive way, not just for those analytically trained, but for clinicians thinking with psychoanalysis.

RH: I’ve heard this question be posed to you at least twice. But we’re still curious. The thing that’s come up over and over, particularly a question that organizers and activists—people whose belief in/work in and belonging to the collective is most critical— might pose when engaging your work on exigent sadism, and this idea of dethroning repair as the apex of mature psychic functioning and mature social relations. Communities, collectives require an aspect of prioritizing connection over atomization. And sometimes at great personal cost, arguably for one’s own happiness, or to realize certain political commitments. Is that like acquiescent masochism? Does your work prioritize the individual? And what does that mean for the collective?

AS: Yeah, this is a really good question. And yes, it has been asked of me a couple of times, but not this way. When you say that, to some degree, all collectives require

subordinating the individual will to the group, including to the will of the group that will arise out of this process, this is all already in Rousseau, social contract theory 101. This is how all societies are supposed to function: by surrendering their self-interests and personal will to the State, which will then organize social life and social action. So, to me the idea that collectives are formed by handing over ourselves to a group, is from the get-go suspect.

This, by the way, is also how the prioritizing of relationality seeps into, infiltrates, movements. What collectives require is a shared vision and shared political commitments, not personal connections and liking each other, let alone the notion that we will all get along. Ideally, people with shared politics might also share connections but politics is a project with certain objectives that need to override personal ambivalences, likes and dislikes, competitiveness, not liking how someone does things, not being able to bear this or that about them. What brings people together in these contexts is a shared political vision, and that, to me, has to supersede everything else when we organize. We may or may not make friends, or form deep bonds through that process, but it’s neither guaranteed nor is it the goal (and here, let us also remember the perils of the Kumbaya feelings you and Safia raised earlier).

If we imagine political organizing as entailing the substitution of abdicating one’s will to the State to abdicating it to another group, a collective, a movement, call it what you will, then we’re merely reproducing the same process, migrating it from one group to another. This is where self-sovereignty comes in. Think about yourselves for a moment. I suspect that each time you have decided to organize, you have to make some decision, to step into something, to think about what you might be giving up, what you might be risking. If you don’t step into that out of a place of sovereignty, of having made a concerted decision that you just have to accept those risks because you can’t bear things the way they are any more, that you can’t live with, say, a genocide unfurling with your tax money, if you enter these spaces without your own critical consideration, you are more likely to end up in a place of what Freud described as mass psychology, where a charismatic leader can manipulate the collective and take them to a really problematic place that has nothing to do with their original values.

To say that differently, I don’t think that the substitution of the individual will by the collective will guarantees ethical political work by any means. If that question comes up, about whether in maintaining our selfsovereignty we are siding with atomism, it’s because we have bought into the idea that can only mean self-interest. But it is certainly

possible to have self-sovereignty and be quite interested in the world, not just in how to promote oneself or how to preserve one’s self-interests or entitlements. Think for example about Aaron Bushnell: there is a different meaning to his self-immolation if it comes out of a self-sovereign place, as opposed to killing himself in the throes of following a movement. If you’re joining a movement to, say, fight for Palestine, fighting for Palestine should be more important, always centered, and you will always have to be assessing whether the group is continuing to live and organize towards the values that matter to you. There is, indeed, something bigger than relationships to one another that drive a movement (though, don’t get me wrong, relationships help a lot!), and that is your ethics: self-sovereignty comes in in the course of accepting that you have to follow that trail and what it will cost you. To prioritize the collective’s relationships to each other, smuggles back in, I think, the notion that, of course, an individual is only thinking individualistically, and I don’t think we have to accept that.

RH: Safia, what do you think?

SA: I take it as an opening for something more. I almost want to hear more. I know that we’re almost, you know, running out of time. But I think it’s extremely important to talk about how sometimes we enter into a mass psychology..that’s kind of inevitable. Every time you are part of a collective, there are those ties.

AS: Is it inevitable though? Surely, when a gestalt forms that’s larger than yourself and you get excited by something that’s larger than yourself there is a pleasure in giving yourself over to it. But does that not restore some sense of innocence, even a regressive idea that the group will take care of things, that it can be trusted. Sure, you may trust the people around you, and maybe you have a great leader, and maybe nothing will ever go wrong - though I am not sure that that ever happens. But for me, movements that are made up of people who just surrender their will over to the movement are worrisome. To put it differently, a movement that cheats its participants from their critical faculties (e.g., that expects or yields obedience, even when that’s done under the rubric of “collectivity”), can easily be coopted into fascism.

RH: I put forward as a general orienting point in the beginning this fantasy audience that I was conjuring of people like us, early in their careers. My idea of who was at the conference. Is there anything you’d want to get through to this audience, anything we missed that you might want to emphasize.

AS: There is one thing that I want to say, especially addressing early career people. It’s one thing to critique psychoanalysis and another thing to not engage it. By all means, critique, even take down what you think is problematic, but to do that you’ll have to study it deeply first. Of course, you don’t have to know psychoanalysis, you can direct your political commitments through other channels. But if you want to do psychoanalyticopolitics, you’ll have to know your psychoanalytic theory very well; it’s not enough to name all of the harmful things that psychoanalysis has done and all its problematic ideas. Like with a jenga tower, you have to have a sense of what you are unsteadying by pulling out a block, what part of the house will have to come down, what needs to be rethought and what is unsalvageable. You’re going to need to know what the conversation is right now, even as it may be difficult, painful, hard, phobic, hateful for minorities, hostile to difference. If you love psychoanalysis, you can’t spare it but you also can’t be facile in your critique – and that’s a hard thing to do because much of psychoanalytic theory is also conceptually dense, and that can feel exclusive, let alone too much energy to spend on something to criticize it. My own personal opinion is that we need the new generation of analysts, to be politically engaged and theoretically innovative: who else will write the better theory we so desperately need?

There is a trend that I’m seeing right now that worries me quite a bit: of young, politically committed, hopeful, determined clinicians who will say they don’t read psychoanalysis or that they refuse to cite it. I mean, refuse all you want, but if you want to have a psychoanalytic conversation, if you want a better psychoanalysis, you’ll have to build it. Choose your interlocutors, of course. Engage Black feminisms, queer of color critique, trans scholarship, decolonial studies, history, biography—you really, don’t have to stay within psychoanalysis. But you also have to know psychoanalysis. Sorry. This is a little bit of my manifesto. I’m especially worried about that because I think that that’s how we’re going to lose the battle of building a better psychoanalysis.

SA: Yeah. And it’s touching on what we identified in the theme of this issue of the journal. Our feeling of this ambivalence of conference attendees about the future of psychoanalysis and what to do with that. It’s not a stable place to be in. And, so, something has to change in the field. That’s what’s represented there. And are the institutions, as they are, as they exist, are they going to continue to be the same ones? And so we kind of have to look at it both from the outside in. And that’s really what we’re trying to capture here.

AS: Intellectually speaking, simply rejecting things is a low hanging fruit move. For example, if you’re going to say, I don’t want work with a patient who comes in and says Zionist things to me, my question would be, what is the theoretical revision you are proposing? Because you obviously don’t mean that we should now start terminating with patients that upset us in big ways. To be clear, I’m not saying this like ironically, but very very seriously, as an invitation to think. What would be your proposition, give it some thought—is there a level of distress above which, an analyst gets to opt out? How do we communicate it to the patient? What do we do about the fact that this would make patients not trust us enough to say things (they think) might upset us? Is this about a new kind of technique? A new kind of matching at the beginning of treatment? I would not agree with half of the things that I just said, but that’s not the point: the point is that what moves us forward is when each of our “no”s are accompanied by doing the work and taking the risk of saying new things, things that people may not agree with, or that you yourself will not agree with yourself in two years from now. Writing theory is actually much more risky than it seems— which is why I said to you at the beginning that my thinking about exigent sadism is very much in evolution. Half the people I’m talking to these days are saying that it’s a good idea, but “sadism” is an unfortunate choice of a term, better to select another one that’s less conceptually fraught. I feel clear that I can’t do that (for reasons we didn’t go in today); but I’m also thinking about it every other moment. What I am trying to say is that if you want new thinking, the stakes are high, your generation has to be part of creating it, which is not just intimidating but also exciting. You’re going to be part of how new theory gets formed and of the changes it brings to the field!

RH: Thank you. I hope we continue to be in conversation for a long time.

AS: I hope so, too. It was really nice to meet you and get to know your thinking some. And I appreciated being asked questions I haven’t been asked before. So that was also really fun, thank you!-

ENDNOTES

1. Translation, for Laplanche, is the process of converting the unbound energy of enigma into meaningful bits, coating those kernels with meaning, thus making them psychically representable. Enigma, briefly, has to do with the inscrutable (because unconscious) communications that unavoidably surcharge any and all communications that the adult addresses to the infant.

Reading Sexuality Beyond Consent in Beirut

Review of Saketopoulou, A. (2023). Sexuality beyond consent: Risk, race, traumatophilia. In Sexuality Beyond Consent. New York University Press.

Sexuality Beyond Consent by Avgi Saketopoulou pushes us to work with the sexual as a probe instead of an affirmation that offers socially acceptable intelligibility. Saketopoulou carefully explores the nuances of perverse sexual practices today and the big questions of trauma and consent. By delving into traumatisms, affirmative and limit consent, sensible sadism, and exigent sadism, the author gives us ample theoretical and practical knowledge to imagine our sexuality as an experience that can produce authentic intimacies and transformation.

I read this book in a moment of continuous rupture, and there is no guarantee of generative re-translation. Beirut, the city where I lived all my life, relentlessly overwhelms and shatters with almost no intermission. The time and space from which I engage with this book is a real that always puts us in the face of the unknown, quite sadistically and nonconsensually. Belonging to a place and time that performs increasingly destructive practices on our psyches and bodies is a traumatic experience. To discuss sex in Beirut is, inevitably, to have a conversation about rape and sexual assault. Over the past five years, a number of sexual assault scandals have surfaced. Women used social media platforms to expose men who sexually assaulted them. This was always followed by an online spectacle of debating consent, justice, and punishment. With this context, I ask what it means to read Sexuality Beyond Consent today from where I stand. To me, it means that we must expand our understanding of sex and sexuality as more than a matter of feminism, gender, trauma, justice, and healing.

Sex and sexuality are heavily contested areas that compel almost everyone. A culmination of our anxieties about our histories and what they make us want to do with our bodies drives the work and thought of psychoanalysts, queer theorists, and feminists, always seeking to answer the “why” of perverse sexual practices. The why here is an anxious one that comes from a desire to contain the sexual drive and rid it of an enigma that risks danger and trauma, or more accurately, more danger and more trauma than what the Other already introduces into our interiority. We often look to keep our chaotic sexualities on a leash, minimizing their disruptive potential. We take safety measures that conceal enigma: consent, equality, mutuality, conventional intimacy, and trauma repair. Through these, the potential that our sexuality can have in elucidating our relation to the other inside us and around us is reduced to a politically sterile phenomenon that does the heavy lifting

of neoliberal sexual politics, which traps sexuality inside the realm of comfort, validation, control, and safety, and obscures our efforts towards transformation by diverting action towards the goal of corrective and punitive justice.

In what follows, I offer a brief summary of the book and then discuss the political implications of “feminist consent” and retributive measures in existing struggles towards justice in sexual assault scenarios, and I contrast this praxis with exigent sadism, a framework that explores sex, (non)consent and trauma through the caring yet arduous touching of wounds.

Through a Laplanchean lens, Avgi Saketopoulou brings the concepts of trauma, consent, sexuality, and power to light, exploring how current understandings of them are dangerously rigid. This rigidity is promoted by the assimilative translation that our ego executes and which our unconscious resists through sexual perversity, aiming to preserve the dynamism and productive potential of our psyche. Ungoverned and untranslated psychic material is opaque and unintelligible, and the author invites us to settle in this opacity via case studies of queer patients and couples engaging in polymorphous sexual practices with sadist and masochistic dynamics. By putting opacity in dialogue with the ego’s assimilative tendencies, we can expand sexuality through cumulative intensification, the more and more of the sexual drive, potentially reaching overwhelm and rupture, where the potent untranslated opaque inside us interacts with itself, as it comes into contact with the opacity of the other. Exigent sadism is the method through which this can happen, and it requires a steady and expansive touching of our touch-demanding wounds. Exigent sadism, according to Saketopoulou, is a ruthless yet ethical and necessary experiment in risk and passibility between the sadist and the masochist, as they root themselves in patience and vulnerability to possibly encounter an unknown, setting in motion something that allows newness to emerge. A necessary violence on the ego’s compulsion to translate needs to be willed into action via a repetition that re-presents instead of one that merely represents. Exigent sadism is not representational, and it does not simulate the unequal power dynamics between sadist and masochist. Instead, it is both the sadist and the masochist giving themselves over to the opacity in themselves and in each other, from their different positionalities, without imposing prerequisite meaning on the encounter, thus creating space for a tender but ruthless slap in the face kind of experience, which allows transformation and connection beyond egoic constructs.

In one of our catch-ups over coffee, a friend and I discussed BDSM. She says, “Many things happen that you don’t account for, and

Nour NAHHAS

you just let them slide.” What she describes is a practice that compromises the integrity of informed and affirmative consent “in the heat of the moment.” This moment, with its chaotic and unguaranteed outcomes and my friend’s discovery of having to let something slide, is a source of anxiety in feminist discourse on sex and pleasure. Letting something slide would imply being coerced into accepting an unwanted act that is unbounded by the mutually sanctioned consensual act. It is directly seen as a silence that replaces verbal or physical objection. This is symptomatic of the politics of affirmative consent that wants to retroactively rectify violence in a non-existing after-the-fact scenario. Coercion is viewed to be a consequence of power imbalance and an exercise of force that affirmative consent seeks to remedy through clear and static communication about the boundaries of the sexual encounter.

I want to take this type of consent a step further, calling it the consent of feminism, which a woman gives to a man, hoping that he handles it with care. I insist here on the scenario of a heteronormative dynamic because it is the very type of dynamic that egoic feminism looks to eradicate but actually reinforces. Feminist consent is given to prevent the harm that results from breaking it by the one with more power. The sexual encounter is, therefore, entered with the concern that things could get out of hand and lead to violence. The preoccupation with safety implies that sex is an idea and practice driven by the man’s desire, rendering it too dangerous to roam by a woman without the armor of consent. Through feminist consent, the sexual encounter is made inclusive of a woman’s desire under the condition that she is crystal clear about it, within the binary of “yes” and “no,” warding off the dangerous opacity of the male sexual. Feminist consent is a one-sided speculation, with the trauma of violent masculinity as its prerequisite. The scenario of violating it is the elephant in the room, asserting that the encounter must be under the moderation of language and reason. In that, the sexual is a risk that must not be taken. It remains unquestioned: a goal-oriented venture that involves the ascribed gender roles and identities of the ones partaking in it, disavowing any unplanned alterity that may be introduced into it and hiding behind the noble guise of pleasure and intimacy. Sex in the realm of feminist consent organizes around the patching up of historical wounds in service of an equal and just experience as the only way of fostering intimacy. While it antagonizes the historical subjugation of women by men, it inaugurates a traumatophobic sexual encounter geared towards de-traumatizing, producing less and less trauma, making it the essential problematic of sex. Through this perspective,

the why of sexual perversities, like a woman desiring rape play, while accepted and celebrated as her practicing her sexual agency, is attributed to the compulsive repetition of the traumatic experience in order to work through it and heal from it. Rape is, therefore, the intelligible answer to why some women engage in rape play. This approach equates rape, a violating act, with a scripted simulation enacted by the two characters, rapist and victim, at surface level, with the distinct goal of initiating the process of healing through repeated exposure. What is actually in repetition is the pre-assigned and unquestioned meaning and appearance of rape, with the fantasy of consent included in the dynamic, which at this point is a wish, as all fantasies are: a wish for it to have been present at the time it was violently erased.

Here, I want to go back to the danger in our limited notions of sex, trauma, and consent by linking their association to the retroactive wish of consent. In her book, Saketopoulou spends time differentiating between shattering and damaging in perversities that weave in them the traumas of slavery, nazism, and misogyny. What shatters in the re-presentation and the re-acting of trauma is our relation to our narrativization of it. We come undone as a result of this shattering as we give up the wish of consent and work at the level of limit consent, a non-paranoid position promoted by the will of non-willfulness. This is possible when the engaged parties surrender to their uncensored opacities, allowing for the expansion of experience beyond language instead of the expansion of its languaged moderation.

Rupture happens here, and it is not of a damaging nature. What is actually damaging is a script of an experience written on the grounds of the wish for it to have never happened. I see in this a denial of the collective histories of subjugation of women, black people, and queer people. We are prohibited from revisiting our histories freely and are confined to the realm of victimhood and trauma. It is important to look at the repetition of trauma in traumatized subjects as a demand rather than an aimless and self-destructive compulsion. Born out of necessity and possible within the framework of limit consent, repeating a history is a commitment between the sadist and masochist characters, radically involved in the act of the moment instead of its symbol through care, patience, and vulnerability. Recognizing the fragility of the boundary between yes and no is the primary feature of limit consent. It takes as a starting point the tension between the two opposing poles, liberating them from the dynamics of who says yes or no and why. Limit consent is a particularly passible position to adopt during the sexual encounter that allows it to reveal itself to us and initiate a transformation.

Feminist discourse sees this as a risk and avoids it through feminist consent, as it cannot recognize this work’s caring, vulnerable,

and patient aspects and only reacts to its outrageous symbolization. It also refuses to accept its contradictions: How can consent be hinted at while being absent? How will trauma be healed if the same encounter is happening again and again? How do we get rid of trauma by re-inviting it into our bodies? These apprehensions stem from the ego’s fight against passibility and its quest to purge what it cannot assimilate to repair.

I move to the political implications of a liberal framework of feminist consent. The ego’s translations guide our political action in consent and trauma. Transformative justice and accountability are praxes that seek to restore a pre-violence condition where the perpetrator is held accountable and potentially punished for what he did. The victim, in a utopian scenario, enjoys the benefits of retribution and goes on to heal from her trauma. By breaking down justice and accountability this way, I do not seek to fully critique it, but I intend to delve into its fixation on the perpetrator and his craved downfall. I do not necessarily imply a need for sympathy with persons who perform sexually violent and damaging acts on others. What I am trying to say is that this form of justice and accountability is zero-sum: the violence committed must be recognized and named fully for us to achieve, on the other hand, the recognition of the victim’s pain and trauma. I see this as the other’s intromission through a rational diagnosis and treatment of harm and its consequent pain. This constitutes traumatophobic just action that intends to eliminate harm and pain at all costs by fixating on stripping the perpetrator of the power he exercised through punitive action and restoring it for the victim through trauma healing. Traumatophobia promotes re-traumatization as it repeats the intromissions generated by the social’s pre-conditioned meanings, adopting them as symbols too evident to question. There is no time to question when a rupture has happened, and it is imperative to suture it. In this, there is the implicit wish for the assault to have never happened and a tacit conviction that the victim is imprinted with this trauma forever. As it repeats, justice discourse is more concerned with the rapist’s relation to what they did than the victim’s relation to what took place and how it impacted her. This is synonymous with sensible sadism that is based on the compulsion to repeat the rationalized meaning of the trauma, in contrast with our psyche’s demand to revisit our relation to it, to potentially change it. We can see this kind of sadism at the core of current waves of justice in sexual assault incidents. It also exists in trauma-informed approaches and therapies and cultural phenomena like trigger warnings and politically correct references.

So, what works for trauma? According to Avgi Saketopoulou, re-presentations of trauma stem from a demand to come alive again and manifest similarly to how they first appeared, without the paranoiac concern of avoiding further injury. This practice requires the coexistence

of care and ruthlessness with both sadist and masochist. If this method seems to be a stretch in scenarios where actual harm was committed, it’s because it is. Exigent sadism does not ask a traumatized woman, for instance, to reenact a violating interaction with the man who raped her. A practice of exigent sadism, in the cases of sexual trauma, necessitates infrastructure that allows for care, vulnerability, patience, and ruthlessness to exist simultaneously as the traumatized subject delves into opacities related to the traumatizing situation in a space where tender but relentless intensifications of an experience can take place, allowing the transformation of her connection to the fact, after the fact, beyond egoic constructs.

In the last chapter of the book, Avgi endorses the necessary sadism in the traumatism brought about by a photograph, a play, a BDSM session, and a psychoanalysis session. She challenges the conventional view that art, sex, and therapy are spheres of emptying out the unconscious from the other’s intromissions by verbalizing and transforming them into a different symbol. She asks us to allow words and images to penetrate us and invite our alertness to what might make us feel. Alertness to an unexpected feeling is what exigent sadism requires from us and our politics. Letting the other immerse in us is a particularly freeing position in relation to our interiority and alterity. It offers a space of resistance to the ego’s binding urges that seek to swipe new material under the rug of the dominant neoliberal necro-capitalist and consumerist domains. In that, exigent sadism’s demand of passibility empowers us to feed the generative drive of our unconscious as we experience more and more as a necessary measure of care and vulnerability. It is crucial for us as subjects to recognize the destructive sadism in our world and go beyond it instead of appeasing it with sense. The practice of this recognition starts with us, not as individuals and not entirely as subjects but as others capable of working with the opacity of otherness. I don’t mean that exigent sadism is the process of sitting with our difficult feelings or pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zones to maximize our potential in life. This is a clearly individualistic and egoic approach to experience and transformation. To practice exigent sadism with ourselves and in our politics is to recognize the limits of our passibility to alterity, which our ego constantly fights. To conclude, exigent sadism creates mutuality in our relating to the other together. We open ourselves and each other to experience, and we become porous to transformation because we need each other and, as such, are able to commit to vulnerability and surrender only together.

WORKS CITED Saketopoulou, A. (2023). Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia. New York University Press.

Treasures of the Well Marilyn CHARLES

Memory is a funny thing. It flows in waves that reverberate in their own small universes of echo. And echo is the stuff of which mind and meaning, Lacan’s Imaginary, are built. Along with the hall of mirrors, we have the realm of echo, the aesthetic residue of embodied, sensory, affective prosodies through which unconscious threads travel and link, forming patterns that call us forward to uncover their mysteries.

My earliest memory is of sitting outside my attic bedroom – which my grandmother had co-opted – anxiously waiting for her to be released from behind the door she could not open. At around the same age, 5, I remember being shamed by my mother for having picked the neighbor’s flowers to present to her when she arrived home after the birth of my younger sister. I remember thinking that this sister was extraneous and expendable but then bonding with her, adopting her in a way that sustained us both for many decades.

I had recurrent dreams as a child, dreams of labyrinths and spaces narrowing and becoming impassable even as I tried to traverse them. In retrospect, I see how they marked aspects of my life story I had no way of consciously knowing at the time. Some dreams mark my mother and older sister as points of danger, opposing my family role of intruder breaking into the symbiotic entanglement of parents with their first child.

In one dream, I was being chased by the big bad wolf. I ran into our shared bedroom, hiding under the vanity table at my older sister’s urging. When the wolf came to the door, my sister opened it and silently pointed

to my hiding place. My unconscious mind recognized a treachery that lurked within the sister I so longed to be close to but who seemed repelled by me, whose own childhood dreams were of killing me and of watching my mother disappear.

Looking back at the ways my unconscious mind was always working at the enigmas life had left me, it is hardly surprising that psychoanalysis called to me. Where else can we find such a receptive recognition of truths that otherwise emerge only as symptoms to be managed or eradicated?

I also had recurrent stomach aches as a child, symptoms that seemed quite real at the time and often kept me home from school, a relieving respite from the demands of daily living. When I went to summer camp, my sense of time faltered. No longer marked by the daily routine of the school day, I was faced with the enormity of time stretching out before me with its unfamiliar demands, and presented myself at the nurse’s station several times a day. It was only later that I could see myself through the nurse’s eyes, this pattern repeating itself when I was sent away to boarding school at age 13 and desperately needed to return home. The symptoms were never sufficient to invite the type of attention I yearned for. Instead, I incurred my parents’ frustration and rage, attenuated only by the earnest, loving voice of my younger sister.

Psychoanalytic folklore suggests we marry our parents but, however lost I was in my conscious mind, I had the intuitive sense to marry someone like my sister; the only person in my family whose love shot true and

unwaveringly loyal, who loved me for all the right reasons. My relationship with my older sister was much more entangled. It was years before we could navigate past the impasse structured by the conditions of our births. In adulthood, it was my older sister I emulated as I found my way into the realm of scholarship through which I learned to translate the aesthetics of experience into forms that could be communicated to others and played with. I felt, bizarrely, as though I were channeling my sister in order to meet these challenges, much as her creative efforts were inhibited by the sense that she was trespassing into territory that had been vouchsafed as mine.

When I left home for college, I sought assistance for the somatic maladies that plagued me. Being sent repeatedly to psychologists for somatic complaints was disturbing. Looking backward, I see how these individuals align with the nurse from summer camp but, at the time, all I could register was the refrain from childhood, saying accusingly: ‘what’s wrong with you?’ Everyone seemed to already have answers that were not mine and, afraid of disappearing even further under the weight of others’ indictments, I steered clear until the psychologist my mother was seeing—in her attempt to emotionally distance from her very trying daughter—asked to meet me. This man (who I later discovered was blind) seemed to really see me, saying only: ‘You seem to be here and trying to get there.’ Finding someone seemingly interested in tracking me in relation to my own desires, without the accusing glare that too often accompanied such interactions, was both refreshing and relieving. I still find it traumatic when I encounter that look from frustrated parents towards my patients. I try to help the accused recognize that it is suffering that drives the assault, not the denigrating hatred that seems to obscure the love underneath. Recognizing the hatred, of course, carries its own truth. Psychic reality has to be contended with.

Lacan talks about the move from the symptom to the sinthome, that creative—I would say reparative—shift from being subjugated by the experiences borne by our historical self to being able to liberate ourselves from the oppression and more freely be. For me, that position is the stuff of Kundera’s incredible lightness of being—when we snatch our soul back from the dark dungeons of despair towards the possibility of being. In this shift, it matters who is reading the signs. Those who read my symptoms as signs of a deeper disturbance in me seemed dangerous and, I think, they were. I needed space to figure out who I was, in my own terms, a project that, paradoxically, was fed when my

own analysis blew apart. My analyst seemed unable to contain my distress, leaving me feeling alone and in pieces. Left to pick up the shards and fragments, I learned to put them together in my own way and, in the process, learned to trust myself rather than deferring to some external authority who must know better. A really good analyst might have helped me with that project, but no one presented themselves at the time, which likely saved me the work of disentangling my own sensibilities from theirs. We are all too ready to take on the mantle ordained by external authority rather than discovering our own.

I have a patient who lives in that dark well I know so intimately, the view Murakami describes in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. The view from the well erases the moments of respite, when we are above ground and our eyes meet and there is light and life. These are the moments I am then obliged to track alone, to be cast back into the well and yet have in mind memories of the brilliance of her face when infused with the inner light that finds its reciprocal in mine. One day, though, she brings in the light. She had been happy for a moment and, in this moment, can be reminded to remind herself that there is also light despite the eternal darkness of the well. Perhaps, then, she might more fully mine those moments spent inside the well and discover their treasures.

The next day, however, the light is gone and there is only the relentlessness of destructive despair, a destruction, I discover, that is fed by the dashing of hope by her mother. I have seen, in family meetings, the adamant insistence on love through a visage of relentless hate. The first time I saw it, I was traumatized. The assault reverberated terribly for me, but my patient was impassive. It was all too familiar to her. How to build a life dependent on parents who espouse their support while undermining her at every turn? Learn what you did not learn in childhood, I tell her. Mourn your failure to fly past whatever stood in your way and respect the failure that is grounded in your need for real support in relation to your own projects. Where is there truth that can be counted on in this universe? Where is there care that is not devouring and soul-crushing?

Sitting with my patient, I am reminded of how it feels to be adrift in a universe in which you cannot register in any way that has both value and substance, where anything good you might find stands as though it must be illusory and there is no ground that does not shift and quake.

Her parents are able to appear empathic by lamenting what they term her psychosis. Their position brings to mind Lacan’s (2016) admonition to beware of words that lie, highlighting how we can invite misrecognition with great earnestness. There is a

terrible lie at the core of the parents’ story that marks the daughter as crazy, with no story, in this way denying the story that tells of her being driven crazy, pushed into the terrible moment where all that was left was a scream marked as delusion. But that latter narrative becomes my story, one that threatens to drive an impossible wedge between her and her parents if she cannot also find their love. ‘My mother hates you,’ she tells me. Better me than her, I recognize, but standing apart from her story leaves her in the abyss of darkness at the bottom of the well and, torn between her mother and me, there is no ground to stand on. ‘You say that the moment of seeing your mother’s raw emotion did not affect you,’ I say, ‘that you already knew it. But I think you knew it with your head but not your heart. In that moment of recognition,’ I said, ‘I think something in you died.’

Now, in our work, it remains to us to repair the damage, so that she can see her mother’s pain that drives the messages so visible in her face, so that we can recognize the anguish and find the truth in mother and daughter’s pain—and the love that feeds the anguish—without turning away or going back down the well.

I spent a good deal of my life at the bottom of that well, reading my way through a labyrinth of living I could not comprehend, that both eluded and leered at me. The working—through of this dilemma leaves me appreciative of—and grateful for—Lacan’s (2016) move from symptom to sinthome, from the oppressive subjugation invoked by imposed understandings/ readings of one’s being, towards a self-recognition that can embrace all of one’s particularities and create a life from them.

We learn to be ashamed of whatever seems unwanted, devalued or different in the context of a family that provides those messages. Designated the unwelcome intruder, I lived out that destiny until I was finally able—far into adulthood—to be interested in the persons and contexts that deemed me unwelcome. Shame turns our eyes downwards and we can’t look back at our accuser. In such moments, we are defeated again. Lifting up our eyes and looking back turns the tables. Standing strong within our being as it is, and looking back to see who is accusing us, and of what, is profoundly, intrinsically liberating, if we can muster the courage to finally see through our own eyes, recognizing the veils imposed by time and history.

Look back, I tell my patients. Be interested in the characters of those oppressing you.

But, as Lacan (1977) reminds us, we each need to find our own way. There is no truth, no magical cure anyone can offer us. There is only the space within which to dream and dare and discover our own. Psychoanalysis helps create a space within

which to imagine, to touch the depths and the heights, to inhabit this well not entirely alone and, as Bion (1990) puts it, to deepen the darkness sufficiently that we can begin to discriminate the illuminations present within it.

I began writing very early, as a way of registering my thoughts and feelings in the absence of any apparent interest from those around me. When I was in analytic training, I began writing from a similar place. No one seemed interested in discussing the questions that were driving me. My first published paper was a way of trying to fathom the breaking apart of my analysis. I tried to puzzle through, from the inside, how such an event might occur. Apparently, this topic was timely enough that it was published without my even being asked for edits. That ease left me ill-prepared for the obstacles encountered in most publishing attempts. I recall sitting across from Jim Grotstein and showing him a rejection letter. ‘They don’t understand what you’re saying,’ he said. ‘But I’m just a candidate,’ I replied. ‘There’s so much I don’t know.’ ‘That’s your inferiority complex talking,’ he said. I channel that moment in my encounters with young people who need to believe in themselves sufficiently to travel their own paths, so I might support them in making the contributions that are uniquely theirs, that no one else could possibly make in quite the same way.

A similar moment happened in graduate school when I was taking a TAT class with Bert Karon, who introduced me to his colleagues at a local psychoanalytic meeting as the student who offered ‘such extraordinary readings of TAT stories.’ Such are the moments that fuel us through the lonely moments of despair and uncertainty that are constant companions in this work.

Knowing we are not alone in it and that others see value in us makes all the difference. Even now, finding a reciprocal light in someone’s eyes when I present a paper or an offthe-cuff remark feeds my soul, in much the same way my patients and students look for that light of recognition in my eyes.

The underbelly of experience is often where the truth lies. Funny phrase, isn’t it. I will let it stand, for now. As I was becoming myself within the frame of psychoanalytic thought and practice, there were enigmatic meanings that called to me, as I began to integrate left-brained theory with rightbrained, embodied truths.

Born into a family with greater respect for facts than feelings, I yearned for external validation for the facts I discovered through my feelings. On that journey, I found in Bion a father who, like my own, came from that far remote other side of the brain in which categories and ‘reason’ prevail. Bion (1977),

however, helped combat my father’s indictment of me, as a ‘messy kid whose intelligence was wasted’ on her, by desperately trying to get to the place where I live, that land of primary, embodied experience that I now think of as the aesthetic realm.

I found in Bion the father I yearned for, someone similarly other-brained like my own father, but one who seemed to be able to orient towards and value my truths. This father did not ordain his own truth but rather warned against accepting the received knowledge that can obstruct our ability to learn from our own experience. Bion’s wisdom helped me continue to learn in the only way I know how, and to value it, leaning on his authority for the endorsement I could not provide myself.

Years later, I see Lacan standing in a similar position in his advocacy for self- endorsement as a psychoanalyst. Although we can, of course, fool ourselves, we can also find truth within ourselves, Bion’s truth instinct, the light I try to steer by. Psychoanalysis helps us find the internal signposts along the pathways between truth and lies. At that level, it seems to have a great deal in common with Zen, as a practice moving towards insight and the absorption that is at the heart of any creative engagement.

Freer now than ever before, there is more pleasure in absorbing myself in all the activities that call to me: art, gardening, music, literature; friends, family, patients; writing, teaching, and theory. There is an aesthetic pleasure to finely-tuned theory, to those extraordinary metaphors that cut to the heart of human be-ing and mark the places that need our attention. And there is an enigma to the human experience that calls us ever deeper, into the well, to locate ourselves beyond the rush of daily life or the noise of well-intentioned encouragements, ‘knowledge’, and other offerings. At best, as psychoanalysts, we invite our patients and students into that project, encouraging the excitement that is the other side of terror, as we enter into the aesthetic realm of the sublime.

Increasingly, I am caught by the universality of rhythm, of primary rhythms that begin to catalyze in the third trimester before birth, synching us to our mothers—and fathers—through the rhythms of their voices and presence. And then, in the caesura of birth, as Aulagnier (2001) highlights, there is another imprinting as we find a new womb-in-the-world through which is imprinted, not only warmth and safety but also the infusion of affective loadings addressed to us by the parent. This welcome—or unwelcome —becomes the template on which all later relationships are patterned, the underbelly of experiences that become enigmatic to the extent that we cannot find the thread.

For me, psychoanalysis, at its best, takes a stand for the legitimacy of the human being, rather than becoming lost in ideas of normalcy or ‘health.’ This stance is inherent in Lacan’s (2016) move from the symptom that marks a pathologized subjugation, towards the synthetic coming together afforded by the sinthome, marking how the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic are uniquely configured for the individual.

Recognition of the preciousness and complexity of this uniqueness is, I think, lodged in the aesthetic dimension, from which place we can appreciate the person at their most essential: the rhythms, histories, affinities, and organizational structures a person embodies. In the story more fully told from this perspective, I think, we find the soul.

For someone so absorbed in playing with language, Lacan (1977) also marked these rhythms in the clinical work, using scansion, a mode of punctuation through rhythm. For Lacan, we come seeking misrecognition rather than to discover some greater truth. Psychoanalysis, then, pushes back against this desire by recognizing the falsity as it emerges. Scansion marks the gaps or empty speech needing further inquiry. In this way, it accentuates by means of a cut that refuses the partial truth being pasted over the possibilities, revealing our false or empty speech so we might discover what lies behind or underneath it.

People come to us having been invited into a world in which they are not wanted. To further a developmental process that has been foreclosed, we must be a willing reciprocator in a journey that invites the unknown, the unsaid, and the unsayable, requiring a confrontation with our own subjugation to a projected all-powerful Other who can never be addressed directly. In this way, we push towards the deidealization and reckoning with our own truth versus that of others that should have taken place in childhood and young adulthood, Winnicott’s (1971) recognition that in order to become a subject in our own right, the beast must be slain and still left standing, an eternal truth held by myths and fairy tales.

When I was 30, my mother told me that she had not wanted me, that I had disrupted the family she and my father had been making with my older sister. My older sister was horrified at this recounting, but I was grateful. It was the thread I needed to piece together the story of this shining, eager baby face that turned inward and darkened as time went by. I hadn’t, as the story had been told, merely been congenitally unhappy. There were reasons for my distress. The greatest gift a mother can give, I learned, is truth, where it is needed. I try to be up to that challenge in my dealings with those I care about. Having been invited to share some reminiscences by

my dear friend, Bill Fried, I offer you these truths as best I can get to them, and hope they invite you to further discover your own. I see that what is missing from these pages is my current family, the people in whose arms I rest and who have taught me to be a better person, more fully myself. There are my friends, and I treasure those who love me, as I often say, for the right reasons. But then there are those particular people: Bruce, whose love gave me a life worth living, and then my daughter Devon, who brought me into the realm of persons—her bright, beaming smile and shining eyes insisting I engage in real relationships rather than remain buried in books, becoming the extraordinary young woman who thought I was a mother worth emulating in spite of all my own exclusion criteria. My son Justin, in his brief time here, taught me to treasure the moments and not let them lie squandered and spent without living them. Justin invited me back into the well in ways that rediscovered the artist in me. My youngest son, Jonathan, whose deep sense of truth invites its own reckoning, reminds me that life can be very hard for us sensitive souls, and that the victory comes in the living of it. He has also taught me about the importance of courage, to stand up for what I believe in and not leave others to carry their struggles alone.

Finally, my grandchildren, Grant and Carson, have taught me that the joys of grandparenthood come, not from the fact that we are not responsible for them, but from the fact that we are doubly blessed in loving them for themselves and for the love invested in them by their parents, as we watch them all struggle and grow and thrive. We come to know them in their separate beings but also see how we are implicated in their becomings by what we have managed to offer from our own beings and histories. From this perspective, whether in relation to our families, our friends, our patients, our students, we are all implicated in the circle of life that replenishes itself and does so, at its best, when we allow the light of truth, as clearly as we can discern it, illuminated by our heart and our soul, to be our shining star.

REFERENCES

Aulagnier, P. (2001). The Violence of Interpretation: From Pictogram to Statement. East Sussex, UK: Brunner-Routledge Bion, W. R. (1990). Brazilian Lectures. London & New York: Karnac. Bion, W. R. (1977). Seven Servants. London: Heinemann.

Lacan, J. (1977). The Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis. New York: W. W. Norton. Lacan, J. (2016). The Sinthome. Cambridge, UK & Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and Reality. Basic Books.

SEX in Review

Jessica CHAVEZ

With the 2024 Spring Meeting theme of SEX , Jess Joseph and I celebrated psychoanalysis as we have come to understand it—a theory of sexual subject formation that posits a subject shaped by a repressive social order and always just past the horizon of knowability. SEX was meant to disentangle the notion of perversion from its historically violent role in regulating, pathologizing, and criminalizing desire. Moreover, we wanted not only to explore the potential of psychoanalysis to liberate gender, sexuality, and the body from repressive social inscription but also to diagnose the political formations that come to bear on our desires. The perversions are inescapably political—as described by Marcuse (1959), they “establish libidinal relationships which society must ostracize because they threaten to reverse the process of civilization which turned the organism into an instrument of work” (p. 50).

We found this all very exciting. We received each abstract submission like a dazzling gift, agonized over choosing between them, and carefully crafted our final program. When it came time to write my opening remarks for the conference’s first night, however, I found nothing to say. I persevered, trying to come up with something, anything, but my hands were empty. I embraced it, not knowing what to say, and wanted to invite it in for reflection. What I initially thought was writer’s block revealed itself to be an inner resistance to saying more. It felt like an ethical stance, and finding something to say felt frivolous. What more did I have to say about genocide, about mass neglect alongside obscene accumulations of wealth, about the injustice and horrors of racial capitalism, or about the snuffing out of queer life?

I have often had quite a lot to say at Spring Meetings: “Do you want to join my reading group?” (I am afraid nobody will show up and never get around to it.) “What about this new text—have you considered it?” “Let me tell you about what I’ve read, my politics, and what I think.” I’ve tried my hand at publishing, given some mediocre papers at Spring Meetings, and entertained a quasi-leadership role in one of the Sections. There were times when I had something to say, and I tried.

With nearly every attempt at having a voice or agency in psychoanalysis over the past 15 years, I’ve been corrected, had things explained to me, or been told that I didn’t understand something. I was apparently doing it all wrong. Our SEX call for proposals generated ample negative responses that may now be the crown jewel

in this collection of hand slaps. Did I have nothing to say because these experiences had silenced me? I concluded that I hadn’t been discouraged by the friction or entertained doubts about my understanding of psychoanalysis. (The exception perhaps being Lacanian psychoanalysis, which I can humbly accept.)

I think the problem is that I have given up the idea that psychoanalytic knowledge production can transform the conditions of our and our patients’ lives. Psychoanalytic theory and scholarship—the politicized psychoanalysis I love and the apolitical psychoanalysis I let in cautiously with my gaze askance—have shaped me as a therapist, parent, and political subject. Still, I feel there are enough words for me to work with. My bookshelf runneth over, and living a life enriched by psychoanalysis is more important to me than producing psychoanalytic thought.

These reflections brought to mind Catherine Clement’s 1978 characterization of knowledge production among psychoanalysts: “Everyone holds his own meeting, talks and talks […] For talking and talking, when you have to listen all day, must be like a strong need, as unstoppable as the urgent need to pee when you’ve held it in for a long time” (p. 17).

It’s not the same as needing to pee, however. Peeing is a vital function. We all do it, and if this were the case, our thoughts would be flushed down the same toilet. The economy of psychoanalytic knowledge production drives the urge to promise something special for those chosen. We live in what Jodi Dean (2012) calls communicative capitalism , an economic arrangement wherein common communications (e.g., our thoughts, observations, images, and memories) are subsumed by capital to extract profit. Communicative capitalism involves network exploitation or a form of exploitation that encourages creative production among a large number of unpaid producers who compete for remuneration—a prize becomes the substitute for a prize (Dean, 2012, p. 138). In academic publishing, remuneration is even more removed from the labor of writing because academic publishers do not pay authors for their work, and the prize becomes an abstract promise of prestige, professional opportunities, or job security in academia. Rather than eviscerating our papers, journals, and conferences, I think that examining our intellectual engagement in this way names an important truth, not in the service of obliterating the network of relationships and ideas that feed it, but to

move forward with a fuller knowledge of this system and our roles in it. We should be willing to tread through our intellectual lives with the same appreciation of ambivalence we might expect from our patients. If one can accept that ambivalence about one’s parents, partner, or even life itself is expected, then we should be able to do the same in our relationship with psychoanalytic knowledge production. Yet, we seem to take ourselves so seriously.

When I gave my opening remarks at the Spring Meeting, I reflected on how I had been looking outside psychoanalysis for knowledge and inspiration. I talked about how my mentor, friend, and colleague Leilani Crane remarked to me years ago, when I was still in my “subject-supposed-to-saysomething” phase, that she had not been reading any psychoanalytic theory lately and that she came to the Spring Meeting to play. This was one of the most inspiring things a mentor in psychoanalysis has said to me thus far because so few people had let down their guard and embraced just being here to play.

In the spirit of play, I shared one source of inspiration from Will Hermes’s biography of Lou Reed. Hermes describes the Velvet Underground’s first public appearance in 1966. The gig was at a Hotel on Park Avenue, at the 43 rd Annual blacktie Dinner of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry. In one of those stranger-than-fiction moments, Gerard Malanga danced with the band, wielding his signature bullwhip while the band played Venus in Furs to an audience of psychiatrists. Musing about what it must have been like for Lou Reed, infamously given ECT during his psychiatric hospitalization in what he had at times characterized as an effort to quash his transgressive sexuality, Hermes imagines that Lou Reed was:

maybe thinking about being a teenager, electrodes on his skull, bit in his mouth, and maybe he aimed the electricity of his guitar into the darkened ballroom at the candle-lit skulls of the doctors and their dates in their tuxes and ballgowns, to share a small taste of what New York psychiatry had done for him (Hermes, 2023, p. 108).

Needless to say, the psychiatrists did not respond well to the grimy noise that was the Velvet Underground’s immersive sonic presence. In a headline, the New York Times described the scene as: “Shock treatment for psychiatrists,” and psychiatrists in attendance were quoted calling the show “a

short-lived torture of cacophony,” “ridiculous, outrageous, painful,” and “a spontaneous eruption of the id” (Hermes, 2023, p. 109). “I wanted to vomit,” one attendee remarked (ibid.).

This scene in the New York ballroom amused and inspired me. What the band had done to the audience of psychiatrists, the attendees’ comments even echoing some reactionary comments made about our and other recent Spring Meetings, is an act of what Avgi Saketopoulou (2023) might call

exigent sadism. I had hoped our conference, SEX, might have a similar effect on the Division. Rather than having something to say, we wanted to create an aesthetic experience, play, and move our attendees. Indeed, what the participants brought to the conference, I believe, lived up to this hope. At every session I attended, I cried, laughed, or alternated between the two states. The lasting moments I took home with me were not those in which a new theory was hatched or a new citation was shared, but those of

learning more about my colleagues—about their lives, their experiences with their patients, and what they think about this unruly network we call psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychology.

REFERENCES

Clement, C. (1987). The Weary Sons of Freud (N. Ball, Trans.). Verso. (1978) Dean, J. (2012). The Communist Horizon. Verso. Hermes, W. (2023). Lou Reed: The king of New York Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Saketopoulou, A. (2023). Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, race, and traumatophilia. New York University Press.

Reflections emerging from dis-possession

I immediately felt the bubbling energy when I stepped into the Washington, DC, hotel at which our most recent Spring Meeting, SEX (co-chaired by Jessica Joseph and Jessica Chavez), was being held. It was a familiar energy, a buzzing one that communicated excitement, anticipation, and even some trepidation as distant colleagues and dear friends gathered to perform this yearly ritual. The feeling had etched itself into me for a decade prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, making it impossible for us to meet in person for many consecutive years.

And yet, I was aware of a distinctly new vector of affect present this year. I wondered internally and then later had my hunch confirmed by many members who spoke to me throughout our time together at the conference: being in Washington, DC, only a few blocks from the White House during a live-televised genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza felt unnerving. After all, it was this Democrat-led White House that had been funding, aiding, and supporting the genocide; the same White House that had allowed Roe v. Wade to be overturned; the same White House that stood idly by as countless civil liberties had been stripped from US citizens, let alone the continued atrocities against immigrants and asylee seekers; the same White House that seemed to care very little about trans children and their futures, despite the Party’s rainbow pins.

What, if anything, could our profession at large, Psychoanalysis in specific or our SPPP have to offer against this bleak backdrop? While many possible answers to these questions emerged at the conference, based on the request from this Special Issue’s co-editors, I will focus my thoughts as an engagement with Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou’s much anticipated and densely attended keynote, entitled, Sadisms: The Risk and the Ruse This feels appropriate, as her rousing call was to lean into a psychoanalysis of which we demand a lot more and which, in turn, demands a lot more of us.

I have been thinking a lot lately about psychic intrusions and the various ways one can refuse them—how to conceptualize the arduous yet life-sustaining struggle that allows for this refusal to happen just as consistently as the intrusion insists on making itself felt. As I think through this, I am aware that I must lean on what Dr. Saketopoulou calls a “theory with teeth,” one that does not disavow the necessity for what she terms exigent sadism. A theory that apprehends the power of exigent sadism is, in my mind, one

that is antagonistic to the normative hum of a deathscape, whether that is in our institutes or our training programs in so-called Washington, DC, Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan, or the Congo; or in any other space where people under otherwise insurmountable conditions of oppression are insistent on sustaining life. In considering the sharpness and precision of the teeth of such a theory, I have chewed on the ways that power and its mechanisms of abuse demand that affect is excised as a precondition to engagement. This is the type of asphyxiatory power that Dr. Saketopoulou kept in sharp focus for us all, one that was de/centered and struggled through as a fixture of the conference. In refusing the ruse of power, in refusing to fully excise affect (or its disorganizing potentials), I witnessed first-hand how members heeded Dr. Saketopoulou’s call, attempting to resist the wager constitutive of the hollow theoretical repair that she grippingly warned us about. That is, attendees attempted to refuse the ruse of a repair that is/was merely a pro forma stamp, one that only registers that the aggressor is ready for the spectacle of an audience, one that relies on the magnanimity of the most vulnerable, at the expense of structural change; one in which, especially in our current moment, to borrow from Dr. Saketopoulou, the commitment of “never again” has potential to collapse into a narrow vs. a robust enough portal to sustain the powerfully transformational “never again for anybody.”

Here, she propels us into a complex matrix of rigorous theoretical stops, expounding on the intricacies of exigent sadism. The exigent sadist exacts their impact by refusing engagement—in my reading, refusing the terms of psychic intrusion not out of recalcitrance but rather as an ethical imperative that guides the possibility of another mode of being and staying in (or importantly, opting out of) relation. She reminds us: “In refusing repair, exigent sadism is not indifferent to the other’s gesture: what the exigent sadist seeks to do, rather, is to stage an encounter that stands to rearrange the terms by which the relationship proceeds.”

With the many terrifyingly familiar repetitions of fascism at our doorstep, this message—and its precision—feels urgent. I wonder about how the mere presence of someone could be enough to stage that encounter. The presence of a Palestinian, a trans child, a Black or Indigenous Stop Cop City protestor, a masked disabled colleague—let alone their willful subjectivity, as Sara Ahmed (2014) reminds us—can “stage an encounter that stands to rearrange the terms by which [a] relationship proceeds.”

A subject in presence becomes the register by which repair is refused. A subjectivity

Lara SHEEHI

that engages in exigent sadism that, as Dr. Saketopoulou highlights, aids us in “refus[ing] the degradation of psychoanalysis into a form of instrumental reason.” Maintaining and sustaining presence in the face of erasure, subjugation, intrusion, and coercion could be enough to stage the encounter in which she speaks. The promise of this potential mounts a libidinal excitation that, in my mind, just might withstand the pressures of the deathscape that threatens to subsume us all.

Dr. Saketopoulou reaches into Fred Moten to extend his notion of fugitivity into the realm of psychoanalysis. Namely, the ways in which we may break free of, or exist otherwise to, to crib Gail Lewis (2020), the regressive, oppressive tendencies within our field. Especially the ones that seduce us into the ruse of repair. In using presence, I am myself pushing on what indigenous scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2020) calls the method of “embodied making and doing” or “presencing.”

Perhaps one of the key takeaways from our conference, then, might be the ways that exigent sadism alerts us to the processes by which a presence is maintained through enacted presencing. That can certainly look like a 700+ person attendance at a psychoanalytic conference in the imperial belly of Washington, DC; or it can look like theorizing against an oeuvre that insists on disciplining intellectual discourse and technical implications; or it can look like refusing not to be disappeared, to remain grounded or landed, whether as an individual, or an entire people.

Here is where I see the immensely important utility of Dr. Saketopoulou’s invitation into states of psychoanalytic dis-possession. Precisely owing to Dr. Saketopoulou’s (2023) own intimate knowledge with dispossession as a Cypriot, I was struck by the ways in which she transmuted the concept into an action to which we must all commit if we are to take our psychoanalytic process, method, and praxis, let alone its future, seriously. I join her in thinking with dispossession, otherwise. Dis-possess as in not to possess; to not consume; as in divestment, which means to practice a different type of discipline that disrupts a social and political order in which we are implicated as psychoanalytic clinicians, theoreticians, and researchers. Another version of presencing that exists in tension with the well-worn channels of foreclosed possibilities that contour the always-already hegemonic norms that inscribe our being.

This is the sociogenic, to borrow from Frantz Fanon, importance of Dr. Saketopoulou’s theorizing and her challenge to us all. She insists that we take up and forward an actual theoretical, practical impact that does

not eschew the attendant material and political realities in which people live and create worlds, both internal and social. A theorizing that animates Audre Lorde’s (1978) commitment to “speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.” ...

Leaning into Laplanchean theory, in which she is a foremost expert in our field, Dr. Saketopoulou reminds us of the work necessary to make translational movement. In

Laplanchean (2017) vernacular, “the indivisible double movement of the “being carried forward” and of “referring back””.

A theory with teeth that allows us to, as she movingly described in her keynote, make the leap to grasp onto the vine that is both not yet there and only able to materialize with the propelling motion of the risk we take to bring it into presence.

As we all left the conference that weekend, the piercing question of translation and dis-posession saturated conversations: Are we ready for that type of psychoanalysis?

REFERENCES

Ahmed, S. (2014). Wilful Subjects. Duke University Press: Durham.

Laplanche, J. (2017). Après-coup: Problématiques VI. The Unconscious in Translation: New York.

Lewis, G. (2020). Once more, with my sistren: black feminism and the challenge of object use. Feminist Review, 126, 1-18.

Lorde, A. (1978). “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”. Paper delivered at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. Mount Holyoke College, August 25, 1978. Saketopoulou, A. “On the Ethics of Violence: From Palestine to Cyprus,” Counterpunch, November 5, 2023. Found at: https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/11/05/on-the-ethics-of-violence-palestine-and-cyprus/ Simpson, L. B. (2020). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis.

Can there be restoration without erasure?

When I was 13 years old, I was in a fire. I had second and third-degree burns all over my face, arms, and chest. I was wrapped in gauze and went to the doctor daily to have my wounds redressed and evaluated. Over time, the burns healed, and many faded out of view—though a few of the more severe ones remain, markers of an event that I often think of as a moment in time when I first really faced that sometimes damage cannot be undone. My efforts to contain the fire and put it out may have prevented its spread, but the damage that occurred to certain parts of the house could not be reversed or restored. Rather, those parts were removed and replaced with objects that were shiny and new, and that held no memory or visible mark of the fire. My skin, on the other hand, bears faded marks that most often are seen as freckles. In this way, the damage is not immediately visible to others. They may not be looking close enough to notice; they may assume them to be sun damage, or they may be deceived if I were to wear makeup to cover them. However, when I go out in the sun, a different story emerges: marks that are jagged, —more like splotches—marks that tell the story of an event that I might allow to be coded as a bad sunburn or age or excess sunbathing become clear burn marks and indicators of a fairly serious fire. In a different light, what might appear sufficiently healed is revealed only to be sufficiently hidden. Before becoming a psychologist, I was pursuing a PhD in English. In addition to critical theory, I had an interest in archival material, which in some part reflected a prior degree in Classics and my fascination with the many technologies that have allowed something that was thought to be lost to be revealed. An example of what I mean is The Archimedes Palimpsest project, led by the conservation team at The Walters Art Gallery. This project involves using multispectral imaging to take parchment pages that appear blank to the naked eye and, through advanced imaging, reveal texts that remain, which had previously been thought to be lost because they were not visible. Some of the text remains hidden even using multiple wavelengths and x-ray fluorescence using synchrotron radiation. This idea of visibility as the marker of whether or not something exists or continues to exist is what comes to my mind as I reflect on the experience of presenting with my colleagues on the panel “Sexuality & Sex post sexual violence: how BDSM, kink, and sex can function as aftercare of the self,” and particularly as I think about the experience of being a part of that panel, the privilege of being in the discussion, and

listening to Avigi Saketopolou’s keynote address “Sadisms: The risk and the ruse.” the following day, all while holding in my mind the violence carried out in multiple countries in the Global South, much of which is the direct result of US-backed capitalist imperialism.

In listening to Avgi Saketopoulo’s keynote address at the annual meeting this year, I found my mind revisiting the keynote conversation between Stephen Sheehi and David Eng at the 2023 annual meeting in which they discussed, among other things, that contrition and atonement also require self-inquiry; and, the thorny idea—to many in the audience—that contrition and atonement do not guarantee acceptance but merely introduce its possibility. There was a question about what it means to resist acceptance, particularly as it relates to locating the aggressive force—if someone transgresses and expresses contrition and atonement, what does it mean for the one who experienced the transgression to resist accepting the atonement? Here, what was signaled was the swift move that occurs in psychoanalysis where the one who resists repair is the flawed subject, which raises the question of whether or not it is ever even a risk to atone if the acceptance is already a known guarantee.

This question of where aggression is located and whether or not the acceptance of atonement is guaranteed, which is also a question in Saketopoulo’s idea of resisting repair, is also anticipated by the work of Sara Ahmed, particularly in Complaint! and The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. In particular, Saketopoulo’s idea that withholding repair is a form of exigent sadism intersects with Ahmed’s description of how when one speaks to an aggression in a system, in her examples, an academic system or familial system, the subject who languages that an aggression is occurring transforms to being the source of the aggression simply through the process of naming what had previously still been occurring but had only been visible to some. These concepts resonate strongly with my own experience of working with those who have experienced sexual violence, where often they are told directly and indirectly that part of a mature response or “moving past” their trauma involves disappearing the wounds associated with the trauma so that others are not able to see it. There is a fantasy here that if the aftermath of the violence is no longer visible to others, we can safely assume that the one who was impacted has been restored. This is just but one reason that the person who experiences sexual violence and goes on to enjoy bdsm and kink is so disconcerting: in their desire,

helen DEVINNEY

their nonconformist delight is also a window into a wound that has not disappeared. Far from repaired and transformed into heteronormative desire, in bdsm and kink, there is often an expression of sexuality and eroticism that cannot be entirely separated from the wounds that proceed.

Another part of Saketopoulo’s talk struck deeply and continues to resonate, and that is about the risk involved in resisting repair and allowing wounds to remain visible. And it is also about understanding who that risk most often falls to and why. In my case, I have written and spoken about how I colluded for many years with hyperindividualism and whiteness to obscure my own wounds related to sexual violence under the veil of boundaries and privacy. Only over time did I realize, in the words of Sara Ahmed in The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, that the folks who “snapped” over and over after being intentionally “wound up” were always people with less privilege and power and more to lose. Their snap delegitimized them and protected me. Once this came into my view, I realized that I needed to take risks, as it was a betrayal and violence to perform the optics of repair and restoration while that same choice was not available to others equally.

In speaking as a psychologist who has experienced sexual violence and who does not offer a repaired wound to roomfuls of other professionals, I have felt many moments of humiliation and othering. I have seen the disgust, the disapproval, and the sense that I am the aggressor. The complainer. The one resisting repair.

I saw many eyes that have judged me over the years in the crowded room of this year’s panel. I briefly panicked and worried that this time, I had screwed up—sacrificing not only myself but those who were taking the risk—more risk given their junior statuses—of speaking alongside me. And then I looked again, and I realized that the room also had many comrades this time. I could see in the eyes of those who met mine the wounds they had learned to make invisible but were still there for anyone looking. It is, without exaggeration, one of the most profound moments of my life. When I said, “We are “those people,” I knew some would ridicule it, yet I felt its fullness for myself and the many others in the room.

Speaking out about the prevalence— candidly the mundanity of sexual violence— is just one form of risk, one form of resisting repair. Others include my work refusing to collude in acts of performative atonement that quickly transmute to punishment— whether at the interpersonal level, the institutional level, or the broader level of the

“helping professions” field. I take a risk each time I say the word “genocide” or refuse to participate in the longed-for relief of joining that somehow, with Biden out of the race, we no longer need to talk about Palestine. I refuse to accept the repair offered to my friends, patients, comrades, and students

in name only—the utterance of the supposed conscious without the accompanying behavior and change that would reveal it to me without words.

I turn my face to the sun, allowing my own burns to surface and blossom. It is not comfortable, but it is real.

REFERENCES

Ahmed, S. (2021). Complaint!. Duke University Press. Ahmed, S. (2023). The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Seal Press.

Saketopoulou, A. (2024, April 3-6). Sadisms: The risk and the ruse. [Conference presentation].

Forty-third annual spring meeting of APA Division 39, Washington, DC, United States.

Sheehi, S & Eng, D. (2023, April 26-29) On the dread of psychoanalytic repair. [Conference presentation]. Fortysecond annual spring meeting of APA Division 39, New York, New York, United States.

Expanding On the Containing Function of kink

Paper presented at the Sexuality and Sex Post-Sexual Violence: How BDSM, Kink, and Sex can function as Aftercare session of Division 39 2024 Conference, Washington, DC.

Multiple authors differentiate the types of sadism and its intent, unconscious motives, and manifest behaviors (Grossman, 2015; Saketopoulou, 2023), usually as a potential means to control, destroy, or gain mastery over others (Grossman, 2015), “simulated violence” with limited risk to the participants for the “interest of pleasure production” (Saketopoulou, 2023, p. 173), and an “aggressive component of the sexual instinct” (as cited in Grossman, 2015) as defined by Freud. Reflecting on my previous clinical experiences as an early career professional in the wake of Saketopoulou’s (2023) book and this year’s Division 39 Conference, it has never been clearer the need for her naming of “exigent sadism,” in its pointed, seemingly cruel, pain where both parties take risks, are impacted, and remain attuned in their care and support. It provided an opportunity to write a paper, “On the containing function of kink,” where I outlined two cases where BDSM was a part of my clients’ lives and became the container for myself as the clinician. This approach helped me tolerate projections of violence1 and helped me step into a seemingly necessary sadistic role in the face of extensive sexual assault and relational trauma histories. Through this avenue, I wished to speak more specifically to sadism that may present itself in the therapeutic encounter with survivors of sexual trauma, who may more readily pick up on the sadistic elements of therapy and who may need to relate to the therapist in these ways as a mechanism of working through—or better yet—working in the circulation of trauma Without Saketopoulou (2023), I find that there is limited room within our field for kink and trauma to coexist without being pathologized. Her work provided me a way to understand being called “sadistic” in therapy while resisting shame, and offers more understanding of the sadistic roles I have had to take up as a clinician, often working within various forms of trauma: I began to understand these clinical encounters as an expression of my going beyond these clients’ limits and our work putting trauma back in circulation for new opportunities of narration and reclamation. Using language aligned with Saketopoulou’s (2023) writing, clients might have experienced me as “transgressive” where the “experiential excess” contributed to the “subjects feeling overwhelmed enough” for something new to occur (pg. 33); in other words, I had gone

deeper than what they had imagined consenting to in treatment. Promoting safety or providing translational tools in this context becomes hindering: if I try to reinforce safety or my own interpretation of narration in the therapy room, it might collapse what the client has allowed and risked into circulation, even if it feels violent. However, potentially allowing the space to continue feeling unsafe without containment may have pushed me and/or my clients beyond the limits of being able to remain present with the realities of violence or potential traumatic rupture. Centering BDSM, with its built-in infrastructure and potential parallel to the therapeutic encounter, could allow me to shift from perpetrator enacting pain in a way that dehumanizes and traumatizes its subjects into the role of a more ethical and responsible sadist, which we may find in kink scenes that maintain awareness, degrees of safety, and rely on boundaries within the encounter. From this standpoint, I have understood myself in the role of sadist as a caring, committed, and aware participant in a position of power in the face of someone suffering as they process, repeat, or engage in an overwhelming, disorganizing state of painful exploration. However, with my identities rooted in collectivistic cultures, internalized socialization around my identities, and my own history of previous harm, this positionality also created many opportunities for alarm, fear, paranoia, and risk in contending with the potential and liability of harming others—just some of the degrees of risk I experienced as a participant in these therapeutic encounters. Saketopoulou (2023) has therefore filled a wish, a need, and a longing for this theoretical approach throughout my work, where she invites us to question, after sexual trauma, can sex and pleasure be just “for the sake of experience alone” (p. 140), what is the role and myth of healing and repair, what are the limits of affirmative consent, and what do we as clinicians have to risk of ourselves?

Our field teaches us specific strategies to support others in their experiences of trauma, but it often shies away from our personal human experiences, perpetuates silence, and over-pathologizes various forms of trauma, which renders it unspeakable amongst its clinicians regardless of what we may know of the statistical truths. There are such mixed messages of what it means to be a “helper,” “healing,” and “healthy,” and an expectation to uphold “discretion” to outperform stereotypes around trauma and avoid the possibility of riskily being identified in this way as “other,” marked by trauma. Not only does this silence across

Natalia BÁEZ-POWELL

our field serve and parallel systemic silence, protecting folks in positions of power in a predominantly White field to continue harming individually or globally the communities that we see and are a part of, but it also denies the origins of psychoanalysis and its radical beginnings. At a much larger scale, it is this type of violent silence, restrictive and punishing, that we are seeing with Palestine. Saketopoulou’s (2023) work is significant when considering what we have to risk being in therapeutic relationships and in community with others, not only taking up what risk may look like but also the implications that internalization of systemic oppression resides in our egos rather than our unconscious. If we are unwilling to risk parts of ourselves or look away from the site of the trauma, we are intentionally abandoning our communities to continued, relentless violence and being the ones to risk it all, including their careers, education, wellbeing, and lives.

As clinicians, we cannot speak about experiences of violence, dehumanization, trauma, and risk-taking without mentioning our current global political situation and the atrocities in Palestine, Haiti, Congo, Sudan, Indigenous lands, and other settleroccupied lands. For the last ten months, we have been relentlessly exposed to violence and trauma, and it is time to allow our egos to shatter2 and reclaim the reality of these experiences that continue to be denied and suppressed (at a professional, individual, and collective level). This includes a shattering of our idealized expectations of government/governance that stifles our fight and our voices that punishes liberation and that uses incarceration as a means of suppression. We cannot look away from the history and current brutality of American imperialism, settler colonialism, genocide, and political imprisonment. We need a psychoanalysis that continues to grow and expand to capture the realities of lived experience, particularly to dismantle systems, do away with the expectation of neutrality, and disrupt safety behind apolitical statements. As I have written previously,

Sigmund Freud himself is not independent of oppression and social justice; however, psychoanalysis, as we know it now, shifted its gaze away after World War II, becoming “increasingly classist, White, sexist, and anti-LGBTQ…[excluding its] origin in racial, sexual, and gendered tensions inherent in Freud himself” (Gaztambide, 2020, p. 84). Can we, then, engage in what Martín-Baró called recovery of historical memory to reclaim the histori-

cal memory of psychoanalysis and liberation psychology that may be lost as a result of trauma (Gaztambide, 2020, p. 72)?

Because when theorizing is linked to a process of “self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice… Theory is not inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary. It fulfills this function only when we ask that it do so and direct our theorizing towards this end” (hooks, 1994, p. 61). I am not arguing for rejecting any dominant theory but rather in line with Martín-Baró’s ideas of “repurposing existing psychology and, where necessary, correcting and augmenting it…creating something radically new and different… from the accumulated knowledge” (Burton & Guzzo, 2020, p. 26).

So let us look at the reality of American imperialism, settler colonialism, violence and trauma, the impact of capitalism and White supremacy on governance and across identi-

ties, and many of the other realities of lived experience. Let us risk the ego of psychoanalysis and put the trauma caused by our community and theories into circulation, even if we must look to other disciplines to help tolerate the risk, the transgressiveness, and the pain. If not, let us contend with what is left of psychoanalysis when we look away, when we do not risk the interpretation of the silence or the leaving of the room, when we ignore the conflict or the defense. We have committed to sit with people in their suffering, in recollection of the worst days of their lives, in the reality of lived experience, the injustice, the mourning, and the pain—psychoanalysis is not silence.

REFERENCES

Báez-Powell, N. (2023, April). Untitled. Paper presented at the Difficult Conversations: Holding the Both/And of Oppression and Character Dynamics session of Division 39 2023 Conference, New York.

Báez-Powell, N. (2024, April). On the containing function of kink. Paper presented at the Sexuality and Sex Post-Sexual Violence: How BDSM, Kink, and Sex can function as Aftercare session of Division 39 2024 Conference, Washington, DC.

Burton, M. & Guzzo, R. (2020). Liberation Psychology: Origins and Development. In L. Comas-Díaz & E. Torres Rivera (Eds.), Liberation Psychology: Theory, Method, Practice, and Social Justice (pp. 17–40). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Gaztambide, D. (2020). From Freud to Fanon to Freire: Psychoanalysis as a Liberation Method.

In L. Comas-Díaz & E. Torres Rivera (Eds.), Liberation Psychology: Theory, Method, Practice, and Social Justice (pp. 71-90). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Grossman, L. (2015). The Object-Preserving Function of Sadomasochism. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 84, 643-664. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/psaq.12023 hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.

Saketopoulou, A. (2023). Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia. New York: New York University Press.

ENDNOTES

1. Case examples were provided during the panel (Session Title: Sexuality & Sex post sexual violence: how BDSM, kink, and sex can function as aftercare of the self) of instances where clients have called me an “emotional sadist” or “perpetrator,” synonymous in these instances with deriving pleasure from the very clear emotional pain they were experiencing while in session.

2. In reference to Saketopoulou (2023), when describing the necessity of the “breaking open of the ego…[as to] animate the ego toward new translating work” (p. 54) and in service of disrupting internalized White supremacy

Saketopoulou avec Lacan

At this year’s Division 39 conference, Avgi Saketopoulou staged an intervention–not the kind typically spoken about in clinical sessions, but rather an intervention on the institutional level of psychoanalysis. She challenged relational psychoanalysis’ false promise of centering repair, especially repair initiated by an oppressor within a system that disavows and thus perpetuates ongoing oppression. Saketopoulou spoke to the ethics of “exigent sadism,” as she developed in her book Sexuality Beyond Consent (2023), and applied the concept to a broader analytic and psychopolitical context. The exigent sadist–here perhaps an analytic candidate in an institute that forecloses even the possibility of its own sadistic unconscious–takes the risk to go beyond the lure of ego identity and evokes the overwhelm of the institutional other. While institutional authorities, in familiar moves, might seek to pathologize exigent sadists, Saketopoulou evokes the urgent ethical necessity of action–especially in the face of speaking to and acting against the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, which institutes and systems in the United States continue to attempt to silence.

In this context, I propose that the Lacanian concept and praxis of scansion–the sometimes sudden but generative end to a session–can be re-envisioned and utilized in the service of exigent sadism. The word scansion is derived from the French verb “scander,” or the practice in poetry of dividing up a line (Fink, 1997). Lacan (1998) also parallels it in his Seminar II to an application of the Zegarnik effect, such as when the interruption of a musical bar creates in a listener the push to resolve or else create something not yet heard in the break.

These are unlikely bedfellows, for sure. It is an understatement to say that Laplanche, from whose metapsychology Saketopoulou developed her theory, was no fan of scansion. In fact, Laplanche split from Lacan’s teaching and direction due to his opposition to the use of scansion as an act of castration (Laplanche et al., 2000). To read Saketopoulou with Lacan can introduce, into Laplanchian psychoanalysis, in lieu of rupture and repair, the operations of the “cut.”

From my vantage point, first trained outside the relational perspective, hearing Saketopoulou’s intervention against repair on a psychoanalytic mainstage was a relief, a way to cut through and out of some of the double-binds of interpretation that can cover over a more radical unconscious that Patricia Gherovici has described as “the last activist” (Seltman, 2016). Furthermore, the spirit of questions that Saketopoulou was asked by audience members and continues

Celeste PIETRUSZA

to look toward answering–why sadism? And now what?--are ones that I find generative through and beyond her work.

But, to return here, why evoke Lacan? Though, in an aside, Saketopoulou mentioned that she does not go much into Lacan, her writing and call to action nonetheless follows a trajectory of social and political psychoanalytical thought instantiated by Lacan’s lectures during the uprisings of 1960s France (Turkle, 2024). Saketopoulou’s use of Sade also reveals the darker perversity of the institutional romance of some Platonic “Good.”

In Kant with Sade, Lacan (2006) looks at how Sade’s writings reveal the operations of a modern society’s extreme commitments to the dictates of pleasure, at times beyond reason, distilling Kant’s famous imperative to a point where the duty to one’s desire and one’s duty overlap. Sade’s world, which Saketopoulou delves into, is one of a denial of optimism and an insistence on the danger of naive conceptualizations of “the good.” In a Lacanian reading of Kant, it is not the idea of a universal moral Good that creates the capacity for respect for the other but rather a recognition of the most depraved of our fantasies. Respect for the subjectivity of others’ fantasies here occurs only through recognition and distance from one’s own fantasy.

In the system of an institute or institution in the U.S., however, where administrators, bureaucrats, and others in positions of power disavow colonial–and thus also analytic–rage through silencing and pathologizing of speech around genocide in Palestine, what room is there to cut, to create distance from the neoliberal fantasy, so to say? Some further description of the operations of scansion is called for here. In contemporary Lacanian practice, refined in the States by analysts such as Bruce Fink (1997), scansion is crucial when an analysand uses the time of the 50-minute clock hour as a defense against rather than an occasion for the free association of the unconscious. Scansion thus works to interrupt the fantasied relationship between the analyst and analysand and open a question about the unconscious. The analysand senses the analyst wants something more…but what? The surprise of what might, in another context, be described as a rupture has the capacity to open through an analyst effect a space of suspension and non-resolution (Pietrusza & Hook, 2016).

In conversation with Matt Lovett (personal communication, July 31, 2024), I began to wonder if an exigent sadist might carry a poetic knife of Lacanian scansion in their kinky kit. To read Saketopoulou with Lacan could mean to see the exigent sadist as occupying the analyst’s discourse through their

severing of ties with the institute. In other words, it is the exigent sadist who severs ties to castrate, to leave the institutional other to tarry with its unconscious. This ethical position speaks, endures, and persists from a space of what Lacanians describe as the sexual nonrapport or non-existence of the sexual relationship, full speech, and plentitude that can only exist through the recognition of lack.

Also writing on de Sade through his novel Juliette, Jamieson Webster (2016) has described the “one virtue” of sadism as “the truth of its refusal to console the miserable.” The exigent sadist who challenges, enacts, and overwhelms the institution thus may expose the distortions of the institution’s own perverse and deadly jouissance that subjugates the desire of others in relation to it. In this context, as Saketopoulou spoke to in her keynote, to leave institutes and institutions that, under the ruse of “professionalism,” refuse to acknowledge their effects, particularly on brown, Black, queer, and other marginalized bodies, can in itself be an analytic act. To fall away from a master or university discourse that disavows and perpetuates the silencing of speech around Palestine is thus an ethical position, one that endures and persists.

Yet, to follow through with a question that respondents and participants asked and considered in Saketopoulou’s Red Clinic lecture “Exigent Sadism: A psychopolitical concept” (2024), what can happen, how can we come together or theorize the possibilities outside the institutions? As the path through for the exigent sadistwww may evoke affects of shame or an experience of Kristevan abjection, how can we not disappear in the overwhelm or go into exile? Here, Saketopoulou’s situatedness in the realm of queer theory can point the way.

In line with Lacanian queer theorists such as Leo Bersani, who writes on the disruptive work of the sexual negative, Saketopoulou speaks to how exigent sadism operates in an anti-identitarian relational mode beyond uncritical forms of dominance and submission. This “enlarged sadism,” as she describes, can be extended beyond Lacanian subjective constitution, I believe, to a collective politics of desire. In the context of Palestinian liberation, Hussein Omar writes with Bersani’s work to dismantle the operations of pinkwashing campaigns that attempt to link LGBTQ+ identity with Zionism. Instead, Omar (2024) looks toward a more radical form of becoming in the context of queer activism, writing that “[e]ven as Zionism may contain within it the kernel of an unconscious desire for its own dismantling, it is incumbent upon queer people who dream of Palestine’s liberation to excavate

not only just their own histories” but also “the choices they made but have now forgotten, and thereby critique their own psychic investments in that project.” While the inroads here vis a vis Lacanian theory, much like with Deleuze, are through masochism, what they share with Saketopoulou’s exigent sadism is their capacity for the space for subjects to resist attempts at meaning-making, though a project of dismantling and re-excavation.

In these projects of collective liberation, a plurality of exigent sadists can push sadism far beyond what could be imagined by its namesake, the Marquis, who in many ways, as Simone de Beauvoir describes, remained complicit with the authority he hated. To

work with Saketopoulou’s call for exigent sadism is not, as Saketopolou’s evocation of de Beauvoir puts forth–to burn Sade, but rather, to decenter him. For to go beyond analytic speech to analytic action means Sade can also no longer triumphantly be used to pull a proverbial Plato with his libertines, elevate them like Diotima without anticipating that they might crash the whole Symposium, break wine glasses, and overturn the party.

CITATIONS

Fink, B. (1997). A clinical introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.

Lacan, J. (1998). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, book II: The ego in Freud’s theory and the technique of psychoanalysis, 19541955. (J. Forrester, Trans.) New York: W. W. Norton.

Lacan, J, (2006). Kant with Sade. (B. Fink, Trans.) In Ecrits (pp. 645-668). W. W. Norton & Company.

Laplanche, J., Osborne, P. & Fletcher, J. (2000). Jean Laplanche: The other within – Rethinking psychoanalysis. Radical Philosophy, 102, 31–41.

Omar, H. (2024). Homo Zion: How pinkwashing erases colonial history. Parapraxis. https://www.parapraxismagazine. com/articles/homo-zion

Red Clinic. (2024, June 24). Exigent Sadism: A Psychoanalyticopolitical Concept by Avgi Saketopoulou. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apLgfikXifY&t=6206s Saketopoulou, A. (2023). Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia. New York: New York University Press. Seltman, C. (February 8, 2016). The unconscious is the last activist. Los Angeles Review of Books. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-unconscious-is-the-last-activist/ Turkle, S. (2024). Psychoanalytic politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud’s French Revolution. (2nd ed.). The MIT Press. Webster, J. (2016). A short lecture on Adorno’s “Juliette, or Enlightenment and Morality.” Public Seminar. Retrieved from: https://publicseminar.org/2016/03/a-short-lecture-onadornos-juliette-or-enlightenment-and-morality/

Cryptonomic analyses: On a sex worker-therapist collaboration

Celeste PIETRUSZA

Even if not working within the conceptual terms of psychoanalysis, sex workers engage directly with the affective and embodied dimensions of sex, love, attachment, the exchange of money, and many other dynamics that have parallels with analytic work. Likewise, while the ends of sex work and the position of the sex worker are different than that of the analyst, sex workers are nonetheless often in the midst of transferences that involve an intertwining of the physical, emotional, and sexual aspects of fantasy.

What, then, might be unlocked if we open up psychoanalytic spaces to the accounts of sex workers and their clients? I ask this question in the context of Division 39’s conference topic, Sex, through the work of psychoanalysts Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, specifically their reflections on what they call the psychic crypt or tomb. In this reflection, I draw from two preliminary interviews on touch, trauma, and somatic wisdom from an ongoing project. The first is with a sex worker, Jessie Sage, who has given permission for her worker name to be included in this account. The second is with a therapist who has coordinated care with Jessie to provide sex work services for her clients. I present their accounts here not to speak for or represent other sex workers or therapists but instead to consider in a form similar to the analytic case study how sex workers and therapists working together may collaborate in a queer, haptic, feminist ethic of what Torok and Abraham (1994) call “cryptonomic analysis” to access and unveil experiences that could otherwise remain outside of signification.

In our interview, Jessie tells me about the ways she attunes to her clients in navigating sexual fantasy, asking questions of herself almost as an analyst might of the transference: “Am I in the role of mentor? Am I in the role of a lover? A stand-in for their ex-wife? Am I in the role of almost a parental figure? Am I there as a caretaker? Am I there as a teacher? Am I there as a lover? Am I there as a therapist? She continues, “There’s all these different roles that people are coming to me for, and I can fairly quickly, based on how they’re talking, how they’re touching me or how they’re not, figure out what role they want me in.” When I ask more about the role of touch–that which is typically not engaged and left outside of analytic practice–Jessie asserts that in her work, “Touch is important to all of it. There are people whom I’ve never had sex with, but there’s always an element of touch, and not infrequently, someone will have an intense emotional response to touch and intimacy.” Specifically, Jessie tells me about her clients sobbing deeply in ways she feels exceed the specifics of

their encounters with her. “I often don’t know what the source of the grief is,” she tells me, “but I feel like my role is holding space for that grief without taking it on myself…to just allow people to live it and experience it and not to be afraid of it.”

In the analytic experience, we likewise encounter and experience–on either side of the proverbial couch–these moments of explicable and enigmatic grief. While an analyst may hold space in a way similar to what Jessie describes, the analyst’s position is ostensibly different than that of a sex worker in its relationship to speech, free association, and making the unconscious conscious. Yet Jessie, like other sex workers with whom I have spoken, tells me that her clients–even ones in analysis or therapy–will often talk to her about first not only their sexual fantasies but aspects of their lives around which they feel shame, including trauma and abuse. “It’s facilitated by the low-stakes relationship and the fact that I have a stigmatized identity. I do think that helps,” Jessie says. “I think that there’s this opening up in sex work sessions that doesn’t happen in other places. And that opening up also gets entangled for the clients with feelings of intense attachment. That is also part of the job of trying to hold them in these spaces but not cross over into something that is harmful for them.”

I believe this aspect of a stigmatized identity that makes disclosure possible is important for analytic practice, particularly in the context of enigmatic grief. In certain impasses and blocks in analysis, marked by internal silences or resistances to signification or symbolization, Abraham and Torok (1994) suggest that a kind of psychic tomb or crypt may be present inside a person. This psychic crypt holds a specific kind of secret, not a conscious one, known and stashed away, nor a repressed one. Rather, this secret has the form of a loss denied and disavowed, a memory “buried without a legal burying place” (p. 141). Inside a crypt, Abraham and Torok describe, a person can protect and bury alive a transgressive, sexually charged lost love object, along with all its traumatic topographies. When there is a guardian holding vigil at the crypt, Abraham and Torok (1994) write that “there can be no thought of speaking to someone else about our grief under these circumstances (p. 130).

When working amid therapeutic discourses that center on uncovering or healing trauma, it can be tempting for therapists and even analysts, I believe, to too hastily try to break into these tombs or, perhaps, more gently try to coax the guardians into stepping away from their posts.

Abraham and Torok (1994) insist that the psychic secrecy of this crypt is essential for the subject and the love object’s survival. Crypts, they assert, are constructed to protect an idealized love object, a love object who also carries their own shameful secret. As such, it is the beloved object’s secret that melancholic subjects themselves must encrypt or conceal. As analytically-oriented therapists, we may have the ideal or wish for those with whom we work to “say anything,” however, our professional licensing, as well as position within broader social-cultural contexts of therapy as a “good” thing may be at first too much light to let into a dark crypt. The patient may fear that their love object may directly or indirectly be harshly judged or even condemned. Abraham and Torok (1994) write that those who carry crypts “have no other choice but to perpetuate a clandestine pleasure by transforming [their pleasure]...into an intrapsychic secret” (p. 131). The presence and pleasure of this psychic secret can create an internal silence or resistance of signification or symbolization, blocking “the active expansion of our potential to open onto our own emerging desires and feelings of the external world” (p.100).

In the experience of long-term analysis, through the articulation of fantasy through the transference, Abraham and Torok describe how a “cryptonomic analysis” can “reveal the processes that inhibit the emergence of signification” (p. 104). Torok describes in a 1959 essay that “it is as if a patient had said, ‘I know I can communicate my fantasy to you–a fantasy that is actually produced for you–because you are not going to push me over the cliffs of my conflicts. On the contrary, you will help me resolve them” (Abraham & Torok, 1994, p. 36). Fantasy, she continues, is “expressive of an attempt at working through a problem and is combined with a desire for collaboration” (p. 36). Unlike the sometimes slow-moving unveiling involved in analytic practice, this communication can happen pretty quickly in Jessie’s work. Jessie tells me that she believes the archetypal roles she inhabits as a sex worker do activate and uncover, at times, some previously unlanguaged wounds. While it is beyond the scope of her work to resolve her clients’ conflicts, she described to me how when she does feel this push from a client, she has sought collaboration with therapists and even referred her clients to therapists. As such, she also plays with the balance and edge of the cliff while not pushing them over.

In an unexpected expansion of the interview protocol I intended when beginning this project, Jessie also referred me to speak to a

therapist who has referred a client to her. This therapist, whom I’ll call Ann, found Jessie while looking for resources for a client who had limited sexual experiences. Ann’s client went on multiple dates with Jessie and spoke to Ann about some of the details of his experiences. Ann noticed, over time, changes in this client and the way he related to others in the world, signifying and verbalizing not only his sexual desires but other things he needed and wanted. Ann believes these changes could not have happened in their work together if it were not for his dates with Jessie and said she

wished that as easily as she makes referrals to a psychiatrist, another therapist, or a personal trainer, she would like to make referrals to sex workers just as easily. “I can’t provide what a sex worker does…and there needs to be someone–and there is–someone who can.”

In their ongoing collaboration, Jessie and Ann continue to navigate turns in their work with this client and, in a contemporary context, facilitate a new kind of cryptonomic analysis through coordination of care that provides space for fantasy and becoming. Ann says she does not inquire into her client’s ex-

periences with Jessie but instead gives him a place and space to speak about what exceeds his dates. “It’s such a tender space to be,” Ann said, “to have one other person who knows what you feel, your deepest, darkest secret or whatever it is.” These cryptonomic analyses, however, cannot be unlocked if the somatic knowledges of sex workers are neglected or considered to be in a wholly different order than psychoanalytic free speech.

REFERENCES

Abraham, N. & Torok, M. (1994). The shell and the kernel, volume 1. (N. T. Rand, Ed. & Trans.). University of Chicago Press.

Exigent Care: Interview with Ashley Ramos

While (sometimes) centering talk about or around sexuality, psychoanalysis, as a field, has historically kept its distance from those in the sex work industry. While sex workers’ accounts could enrich psychoanalytic understandings, instead, as in the larger psychopolitical sphere, their narratives are often silenced or disavowed through a mythologization and pathologization of their labor.

As a parallel to Avgi Saketopoulou’s keynote talk on the “ruse of repair,” I present an interview segment from my ongoing project on sex workers’ somatic knowledges. Sex workers inspired the Marquis de Sade’s libertines, the characters who espoused his political philosophies and narrated the tales of novels such as 120 Days of Sodom. Today, sex worker activists not only embody the ethics of Saketopoulou’s “exigent sadists” in organizing against systemic oppression but also provide important care labor in organizing efforts against the ongoing violence on Gaza and beyond. Through conducting interviews with a psychoanalytic methodology, my hope has been that the quiet listening of analytic practice might serve to uplift liberatory praxis as an alternative to the kinds of weaponized silences that drown out speech.

While I had conceptualized questions for this project around the sense of touch and sex workers’ experiences of trauma in individuals, responses to open-ended questions and prompts went beyond this initial intention. The excerpts here are from an interview with Ashley Ramos, a Puerto Rican and Honduran American sex worker, artist, and activist based out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Ashley spoke about the sense of vision/sight and collective trauma. In a parallel to institutions that have attempted to shut down conversations about Palestine, Ashley expressed fears and frustrations of people “shutting their eyes to Palestine.” She paints portraits and shares videos of children and families living in Palestine under occupation on social media. “You have to keep pushing,” she tells me, “You can’t unsee things.”

Celeste: Can you say more about how your relationship with your body, in your different kinds of work, influences how you think about and practice care?

Ashley: I think about mutual aid and community all the time. I was an artist first. A lot of my art has to do with my body. I have conversations about nudity, fat people, and a lot of uncomfortable conversations. For most of my life, I was a person who didn’t interact with a lot of people, and the art community was one of my first experiences in finding a community. Being open to other people’s perspectives is a lot of what art is about. I could find common ground with people–even people I didn’t like–but we worked together in this community to find and make something new.

I think when I got into sex work, it was kind of the same thing. I learn from so many people in the sex industry. I was able to have and live a different kind of life for a while that I never thought was possible, which was a sort of freedom that comes with a lot of work. And it’s the same thing as a working artist, you’re able to live this sort of freedom, but also with a lot of work and a lot of leaning on your community. I think that’s how life is supposed to be, and that’s why it was a little bit easier for me to get into organizing for Palestine. It was the same model. You’re sitting in a room with a lot of people. You don’t necessarily need to like them, but you have a common goal and are all working toward it. And you’re also taking care of each other.

Celeste: Can you tell me about how you became involved in organizing for Palestine?

Ashley: I first started raising funds for Nadin Abdullatif, who is kind of a figure in Palestine. She’s 13 now, but many people know her from a video that came out when she was 10. She was talking about how her childhood was being stolen from her and how she didn’t understand why this was happening to her. We raised money for her and her family through the collective Pittsburgh Creatives Against Genocide by throwing a community event. I wanted to bring the community together and not just ask them for their money. I wanted to give something back to the community because it came about when we went to these grief groups with people who wanted to share their grief.

I think I formed some sort of, oh, parasocial relationship with Nadin when I saw her in 2021. She was the person who made me pay attention to Palestine. That’s just out of ignorance. I didn’t have a personal connection until I saw her video in 2021 during the pandemic. But here’s the thing: I’m Honduran and Puerto Rican, and I know very well what happened in Puerto Rico, how Puerto Rico was colonized, and how the struggle in Puerto Rico is a parallel to Palestine. I know what the United States did in Honduras. My grandmother fled violence to come to the United States. And the land we stand on is colonized, obviously. I feel for a lot of Palestinians in the diaspora. I feel for anyone who has had to be expelled from their homeland and live that pain on and off the land, that pain still persists. That’s still generational trauma that sits there with you. Even people who haven’t grown up in their culture still feel this yearning to understand themselves. I was able to make that connection, so I reached out to Nadin.

Right now, with Palestine, I’m seeing a lot of people trying to push stuff away and find hope again. After you see so many dead babies and crushed skulls and dismembered body parts, at some point, you’re going to want a break from that, but it’s at the point where

Celeste PIETRUSZA

people are kind of delusional. We’re living in a world where we are holding on to this false idea of hope. No amount of people yelling ceasefire is going to convince me they actually care…it feels like we’re sacrificing the soul of the world for the comfort of the United States. And that’s kind of been driving me insane. I know one activist who says that he is actually anti-mental health at this point. After all of what’s happened, there’s permanent damage–how can you not be depressed? To think otherwise is just trying to regain some sort of comfort that I don’t think can be regained fully.

So, I keep making videos on TikTok and Instagram. I keep doing one a week only because when you do one every day, people get really annoyed with you. Sometimes, Nadin’s sister Souhad sends me videos, and sometimes I make videos. They’re going through traumatizing things. They’ve lost their home. She’s starving. Her husband’s workplace was bombed. They’ve been in refugee camps. She is striving so hard to make these videos. I think about her daily life having to walk somewhere to get water and then having to film her children to get sympathy, still knowing that the eyes on Palestine are slowly shutting. So I think about her every day. It’s a lot on my mind. It’s devastating. This 13-year-old used to say that she dreamed about going to school in the United States. But she’s now like, I haven’t been to school in almost a year. Why does everyone else get to have an education? So I keep posting videos and keep posting the same things and I don’t know what else to say.

Celeste: I want to check in about anything you’d like to add, or you feel is important to hear.

Ashley: The individualistic way that people think is sad to me–why would you be like that if you could make a nest of people who all take care of each other? Because when it comes down to it, we’re not just raising funds for people in Palestine. We’re raising funds for people in jail because they were protesting or people who have done a lot of organizing work and who need help with their rent because they were in jail for protesting.

The people who are still here and still working are the people who care about human beings. They haven’t buried their heads in the sand and haven’t closed their eyes. Maybe that is just part of building communities, longevity, and seeing who is here to stick around. I fully believe that if we can get this right, we can do so much more.

Ashley and her paintings can be found on Instagram @ashley_luz_ramos. She is raising funds for Souhad Mustafa and her family, who are currently in the Al Nuseirat Refugee Camp in Gaza. Contributions can be made at https://gofund. me/1c2a2530

Mark McKnight’s Heaven Is a Prison (2020) Garth GREENWELL

(Republished with author permission)

I’ve been thinking and writing about Mark McKnight’s work for many months now, but each time I turn to it I find myself confronted by the questions that bewildered me on first acquaintance. Novel-writing and photography have a storied alliance, from Zola to Sebald and Teju Cole, but while art photography had intrigued me it had never, until I was asked to write on McKnight’s work, affected me so profoundly; it had never imposed itself with such existential urgency or so powerfully intersected with my own endeavors in art-making. My fascination with McKnight has led to an education in the history of his medium, and especially in the modernist masters whose aesthetics he inherits, transgresses, and transforms. Some of my questions, I know, reflect my innocence of the medium. How is it possible for an art to be at once so bound to its subject matter, so faithful in the literal representation of particular reality, and yet so prone to metaphor and abstraction? How can what is finally a mechanical process feel so steeped in subjectivity? These are naïve questions but also ones that haunt the medium; sophistication doesn’t resolve them so much as, in a kind of polite conspiracy, discreetly let them drop. Other irresolvable questions—other sources of wonder—are more particular to McKnight’s work. How can these images be so cold and so hot at once, so restrained and mastered and also so utterly unbridled? How can they be

so expressive of both abjection and exuberance? How can they seem—entirely independent of their subject matter—so filthy and so clean? Most profoundly: how can images that reject so many of the usual sources of affect— psychological narrative, social context, the expressivity of the human face—nevertheless be so saturated with affect, so nearly operatic in register? My initial, immediate sense of the work has not faded with familiarity. Its achievement lies in holding these contraries not in stasis but in a kind of vibrating suspension, and this suspension conveys the sense of inexhaustibility, the bottomlessness necessary in all art that commands enduring attention.

Anyone familiar with McKnight’s earlier work will see continuities in Heaven Is a Prison: the gorgeous, exquisitely modulated black and white photographs shot in sometimes punishing natural light, often exposed and printed so that details are obscured and shadows attain a kind of abyssal black, at once inviting and frustrating our curiosity; the dramatic use of the desert landscapes of the American West; the sensual depiction, sometimes tender, sometimes a little cruel— often both of these things at once—of bodies that are often excluded from the canons of sensuality in art; everywhere, a commitment to beauty, though beauty of a challenging, even an adversarial kind. But these new photographs also mark a significant departure. Never has his subject matter been so assertive as in these photos of sex portrayed with pornographic explicitness; never has the style been so sustainedly lyrical in individual photographs or so ambitious in its use

of sequence, the way images are arranged and counterpointed with white space, with visual silence, to generate meaning through poetic effects of juxtaposition, rhyme, and refrain.

To begin with subject matter. I’ve argued before that sex is a kind of crucible of humanness and therefore has a particular usefulness in art. What I mean by this is that sex exerts a pressure on us that brings to the fore—that makes inescapable—the set of interlocked contradictions that seem to me distinctive of the human. We might think of these in terms of polarities, of light and shadow, to suggest one of McKnight’s visual equivalents, or affirmation and negation. Thus sex is an arena of affirmative agency (I grasp, I open, I plunge) but also of subjection (I am grasped, opened, engulfed); thus in sex I seek pleasure, but also something that exceeds or counterpoints pleasure, a pleasure that is always proximate to pain (“pleasure and pain are inseparable companions,” writes Simone Weil); thus in sex I seek communion with another even as I chase an experience that, at least for a moment, obliterates all sense of self and other in what the French call “the little death.” For gay men who came of age in the AIDS era, the intrication of Eros and Thanatos, the impulse to life and the death drive, is much more than a Freudian abstraction. All of these dynamics are heightened, made explicit and performative, in the kind of sadomasochistic sex McKnight takes as his subject in these photos, in which the shifting lines of power active in any sexual encounter are literalized in chains, the effacement of self all sex risks theatricalized in acts of degradation. The photographs are remarkable for their voraciousness, their desire to show us everything, often from multiple perspectives and to very different effects. A man bound by chains eating another man’s ass is not the same act, these photos have taught me, when the figures are framed against a slanted horizon.

The photographs are pornographic, if by that word we mean sexually explicit, hiding nothing from view. (In fact these photos hide many things from us—but not genitalia, not penetration, not the exchange of fluids.) The problem with that endlessly elastic word is that no one can ever be sure what it means. When used in a pejorative way about representations of sex in art it is often a symptom of puritanism, a kind of tepid morality, irrelevant to serious judgment. (Surely it is ridiculous to suggest that so huge and central a territory of human life and feeling is somehow prohibited to art.) But there is another way of using the term that conveys a more plausible criterion, as Roland Barthes does when he defines the “erotic,” which he approves, as “a pornographic that has been disturbed, fissured.” It seems fair enough to say of much of

Garth Greenwell on Mark McKnight’s Heaven Is a Prison (2020).

the commercial pornography produced today that it intends to elicit a singular response— that, like propaganda, it wants us to feel a single thing. Interesting art, art that has enduring force, never wants us to feel a single thing. This is what Barthes suggests, I think, in his image of fissures: that something has troubled a monolithic response, that affect has been interestingly fractured and multiplied. McKnight’s photographs resolutely deny us a singular response. This isn’t at all to say that they aren’t sexy: turning a viewer on is a powerful effect, and these photographs achieve it. But even at their sexiest they are full of surprises; having aroused us, they divert arousal’s rush to satisfaction. In what is to me the sexiest, the most arousing photograph (every viewer will have their own), a man lies on his back, framed by the legs of his lover standing before him. I’m surprised to be aroused by this image: the men aren’t touching each other, the recumbent man’s cock is soft. Perhaps it’s the face I find so sexy, with its inscrutable expression, a mixture of mastery and fondness—or what I read as mastery and fondness, it’s impossible to be sure. McKnight’s photographs have never shown faces before; facelessness has been one of their dominant effects, in images of torsos cropped at the neck, or men lying face down on concrete, or with their faces obscured behind painted glass. Even here the faces are only ever partial, often framed so as to render ambiguous any clear reading of affect.

I am seduced by this photograph, but its seduction troubles or distracts me from arousal. Maybe it is true of all art, or all serious art, that abstraction tugs at representation, the particular always yearning toward the mythic or archetypal. (Barthes sees this as a facet of desire itself, always sacrificing “the image to the Image-repertoire”; so does Socrates, in Diotima’s ladder of desire in the Symposium.) Certainly the most extraordinary element of McKnight’s image is abstract: its geometry, the standing man’s legs dividing the image into a central rough triangle and two echoing inverted triangles on either side. (Is it this geometry that makes it sexy? Anne Carson says of Sappho that she “seems less interested in these characters as individuals than in the geometric shapes they form”; this is true too in some of McKnight’s photographs.) As in all of McKnight’s work there is an exquisite play of textures, grass against skin against hair against metal. From other photographs I recognize the recumbent man as the dominant of the pair, and the next page will confirm that he is in fact holding the chains, not bound by them, but in this individual image that isn’t clear. His posture might be domineering or prone, and the shadow chains that frame his cock suggest—shadows do a great deal of work in many of these photos— another kind of bondage. Another suggestion

of submission: the man’s eyes, which would allow us to read his expression more surely, are blocked from view by his partner’s balls, a suggestion of submission present not in the scene but in the photograph. In all of these ways, the photo presents a more complicated power dynamic than the cartoonish dominance and submission a less nuanced portrayal of S/M’s power theatrics might convey. The photo is richly, complexly psychological; it is, I’m tempted to say, novelistic. And so I have forgotten my arousal—or not forgotten it; it has become one among many responses, which taken together are too complex to be called anything other than properly aesthetic. Many of these photographs move me in ways I have difficulty explaining. Why is it that the images that strike me as genuinely filthy are not of bodies at all, but of the weathered trunk of a fallen tree, its jagged end suggesting an orifice blown open? (Also the mouth of a cave, also descent, also initiation.) Why is it that the photograph that is most explicit, most “hard-core” in its portrayal of the sexual body—the single image of anal penetration—of all the pictures in this book seems to me the most chaste? Is it because the faces are entirely obscured, one body cropped at the torso and the other turned away from us? (But porn often occludes faces without seeming chaste.) McKnight often rhymes organic and inorganic surfaces, so that, in an earlier project, craters evoke orifices, and an image of a torn bag of asphalt is titled “Flesh.” What is it about this image of penetration that makes these bodies seem de-fleshed, that suggests to me not flesh but metal or stone? (It puts me in mind of the social realist monuments that fill Eastern European capitals.) This may be the most profound perversion McKnight’s work explores: that of transforming flesh into inorganic matter, as in this photograph of penetration, and of investing matter with the subjectivity of flesh, as in his orifice tree. The penetration image is even more stark in its geometry than the photograph of bondage discussed earlier, with the angle of the bottom’s legs echoed not just by the legs of the man fucking him but by the thumb and forefinger of each of that man’s hands, and by the angle between the index and middle fingers of his own hand, pulling his balls out of the way. (The furrows of flesh this creates, which rhyme with the indentations in his thighs, interrupt the chastity I feel in the rest of the image, and are the source of the photo’s greatest heat.) The site of penetration isn’t the center of the photograph, as it would be in an image meant merely to arouse us; it forms instead a fourth point with the three hands, less the focus of the photograph than an element necessary to complete a design.

In a culture that has radically privileged sex as a site of risk and trauma and radically de-privileged it as a site of meaning, it may

seem dissonant to suggest that these photographs are always invested in the sacred. But in fact this is the most intriguing of those interlocked contradictions that make sex so revelatory of the human: that an act that places us so resolutely in our animal bodies also provides us with our least dismissible experience of something that exceeds them. Sex is the source of all our metaphysics, and sadomasochistic sex aims not just at transgression but transformation; it is an affirmation, as Michel Foucault writes, both of “limited being” and of “the limitlessness into which it leaps.” Ascesis is a technology productive of pleasure as well as revelation, and the self-shattering sought in sadomasochistic sex is analogous to, may indeed be identical with, what W.H. Auden calls “the hermit’s carnal ecstasy,” mystical divine union. McKnight titled an earlier series of photographs “Decreation,” after Simone Weil’s concept of the unmaking of the self necessary for creating an empty space for God to enter. The idea that by deemphasizing or annulling certain aspects of reality one enables the perception of new aspects is one reading of the deliberately eccentric exposure and printing techniques McKnight uses, importantly violating the precepts of the modernist aesthetic that informs much of his work. The idea of decreation is implicated in the odd sense of substantiality he gives to shadows, and the dramatic way in which he gives shadow a protagonist’s role. So, in the haunting image used on the cover of Heaven Is a Prison, a man’s shadow (underexposed and over-printed to the absolute, abyssal black McKnight uses to such effect) falls between the splayed legs of his lover, an image of simultaneous, ineluctable presence and absence. In interviews, McKnight has quoted Simone Weil’s desire “to see a landscape as it is when I am not there,” her longing for a perfection of beauty that will arise from the very fact of her absence. This is one source of the weird, affecting hauntedness that sometimes characterizes McKnight’s landscapes, as when one turns from a photograph of men embracing to one of a depopulated field.

Central to Weil’s idea of decreation—central to both mystic and sadomasochistic ascesis—is the degradation or humiliation of the self. (These photos remind us of the etymology of humiliation: to be brought close to the soil.) Perhaps the photos in this book that will be seen as most transgressive are those that show a man first begging for and then being covered with another man’s urine. Writing about gay male erotic piss play, and about “urine as an aesthetic medium,” the queer theorist Tim Dean argues that “men who are drinking other men’s piss … are experiencing sustenance, not humiliation.” McKnight’s photos endorse this, I think: in the context of the desert, in punishing sun, piss might indeed be experienced

as sustenance, even of salvation. So the central image in this sequence, which is among the most lyrical of McKnight’s photos, is at once remorselessly literal and immediately figurative: we see a man pissing; we see a fountain in the desert. (This is also the single shot in which we see fluid exiting a penis, the closest we come to a money shot, and so it carries a sense as well of the ecstatic, of the boundaries of the body faltering and becoming porous.) But this doesn’t undo, as Dean seems to suggest it does, the abjection that is a necessary part of the thrill of being pissed on, that degradation of the self that contributes to the self-shattering the postulant seeks. McKnight’s photographs commemorate a transvaluation, I think, by which waste is turned into something precious, a gift, but this transvaluation is never stable; instead, the power of the images comes from their embrace of vacillation. What the photographs dramatize is both humiliation and exaltation, baptism and ordeal, the one guaranteed by the other. The composition of the final photo in the sequence recalls the image of bondage discussed earlier, with one man framed by the legs of another, and again the face is partially obscured, making the expression unreadable. Does that face, running with urine, show relief or endurance, ecstasy or disgust? We can’t know, and so it is any of these things, or all of them. This ambiguity is suggested as well by the extraordinary landscape shot that punctuates or interrupts this series, a gorgeous image of shadow across grass. Here the shadow is not abyssal, but flecked with light; the sun-lit grasses are populated by shadows. Light and shadow commingle in this image, they vacillate, a literalization of both psychology and metaphysics.

These are also political images; McKnight’s work has political force simply by its existence. By centering queer, Latinx bodies, by placing them in non-urban settings, by photographing them in a way that foregrounds beauty, McKnight pushes against prejudices in both the art world and contemporary American culture more broadly. By portraying explicit sex between men, he rejects the desexualization of queer bodies that has been the cost of mainstream acceptance in a culture that to a certain extent embraces same-sex marriage and parenting but recoils from the fact of men fucking each other. By centering bodies that are large, nonwhite, covered with hair, McKnight rejects standards of beauty that dominate both the straight and the queer worlds. And in presenting the scandal of queer abjection, McKnight complicates a too-easy, politically motivated discourse of queer optimism and pride that, as it becomes coercive, deformingly flattens the complexity of queer lives. In their portrayal of open-air fetishistic sex, these photographs challenge an idealizing, exemplary image of queer relation as consonant with conventional ideals of straight domesticity, as well as of easy notions of virtue and health. These photographs resist

easy readings in all directions; they challenge all our pieties. What is most remarkable about them, however, is how free they are of any easily legible polemic; they are defiant without being didactic. McKnight does not present an argument about the beauty of these bodies or assert the value of the acts and lives he portrays; his manner of presenting them makes that beauty and value incontrovertible. The two images of the men embracing are moving because, in portraying the caretaking that is very often a part of sadomasochistic practice, they suggest a closing of the circuit of value. Value is not something bestowed upon these men by some external force; it is something they create and bestow upon each other. McKnight’s work asserts a kind of sovereignty that seems to me nearly utopic; within its frame, the world could not be otherwise. (McKnight has said that one motivation of the series is to populate the landscape of his childhood with queer bodies he wishes had been available to him, a utopic redemption of the past that is a frequent theme of queer art.) This sovereignty is achieved by formal means; it is the sovereignty, I want to say, of beauty. There is a prejudice in current thinking about art that insists beauty is always a mystification of some more fundamental social process, a critique that would strip away the aesthetic as an important mode of experience, reducing it to a species of delusion. It seems to me that this attitude forces us into a false dilemma; one can acknowledge the importance of political and ideological aspects of artistic meaning-making without dismissing the aesthetic effects—the surplus of significance, the splendor—that distinguishes art-making as a human activity. It’s easy to make McKnight’s photographs voluble in anesthetic terms, but the aesthetic remains the primary and overwhelming source of my response to his work. I’ve argued before that McKnight’s photographs have the density of great poems, and that seems to me even more true of this most recent work, with its obsessive use of metaphor and motif. So grasses repeatedly resemble waves; a geological formation is made to mirror the furrow of a man’s back; indentations in gripped flesh chime across photos like an end rhyme across lines. Rhyme is repetition with a difference, a technique McKnight uses throughout this series, sometimes to devastating effect, as when, in the third iteration of an image of a man servicing his partner, a fly appears on his back: a memento mori, a reminder of vanitas. Something similar happens with the images of clouds, which function as a kind of refrain, their suggestions of transcendence sometimes radically troubled (though not negated) by McKnight’s day for night techniques. (Heaven is heaven, the photos say; also, heaven is a prison.)

These photographs also remind me of poems in the way that meaning is so

powerfully generated by placement in a sequence, and sequence may be McKnight’s most impressive formal accomplishment in this book. The arrangement of images is not conventionally narrative: it’s clear that we are not seeing a single erotic session, not least because the landscape is transformed by season, a transformation presented achronologically. The photos are grouped into stanzaic units, which are in turn arranged to create a modulation of emotion that is almost overpowering. A common, powerful characteristic of McKnight’s photographs is a kind of claustrophobic effect achieved through tight cropping and the refusal of horizon. He seldom lets us see bodies or landscapes holistically; he sometimes troubles our sense of scale. This is true of the early photos in Heaven Is a Prison, but the sequence radically opens out, and the final group of photos includes the first in which McKnight has allowed a horizon. We have a glimpse of it, in the upper left corner of the first photo of this group; then it features in images of landscapes free of human forms; finally, bodies and a full horizon are presented together. There’s a strange, equivocal sense of triumph for me in this photograph, in its sweep and openness, an expansiveness not just of image but of affect. As is true of the book as a whole, it gives an exhilarating sense of an artist making new discoveries, developing new strengths. Even as it portrays an act that some viewers may see as degrading—a bound man eating another man’s ass—it conveys an overwhelming sense of affirmation. This is true, too, of the final image in this book, which follows this essay, in which the two men lie in a flowering field, one on top of the other. It is as if the love of these men—a love often dismissed as deviant, frivolous, unproductive, sterile, a love acted out for us in dramas of domination, submission, devotion—has resulted in this eruption of florescence; fruitless coition has borne fruit. Here too there is a piquancy of equivocation: the men are not lying faceto-face, and the photograph recalls the earlier image of a body recumbent on stone, recalls too its suggestion of sacrifice. There are no unequivocal images in McKnight’s work. And yet it seems to me a kind of blessing, this photograph, a profound vision of affirmation and communion, a sacralization of queer sex and sociality. Look closely at the men: obscured in flowers, almost hidden from view, their fingers are entwined.

Armijo McKnight’s first solo institutional exhibition, Decreation, is currently on view at The Whitney Museum of American Art from August 24, 2024 through January 5, 2025.

Safia Albaiti, LMSW is a postgraduate psychotherapist at the Greene Clinic in Brooklyn, New York, with an interest in political psychoanalysis and spirituality in her clinical practice and poetry..

Mark Armijo McKnight, MA (b. Los Angeles, CA) is an artist whose work has been exhibited internationally. His work has been written about in the Los Angeles Times, Interview, The New Yorker, GQ Magazine, Aperture, Art in America, Frieze, ArtForum, Brooklyn Rail, Mousse and BOMB Magazine, among others. His work is in the collection of The Henry Art Gallery (Seattle, WA), Victoria and Albert Museum (London, UK), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA) and The Getty Museum (Los Angeles, CA). His first monograph, Heaven is a Prison, was published in September 2020 and available for purchase. His second monograph, Posthume, is forthcoming (TBW Books, Oakland, CA, 2025). Armijo-McKnight is a Fulbright Scholar (2008-9), the recipient of the 2019 Aperture Portfolio Prize, The 2020 Light Work Photo Book Award, a 2020 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, and a 2023-4 Guggenheim Fellowship. Armijo-McKnight’s first solo institutional exhibition, Decreation, is currently on view at The Whitney Museum of American Art from August 24, 2024 through January 5, 2025.

Natalia Báez-Powell, Psy.D (she/her/ella) is a queer, Latinx, licensed clinical psychologist working in private practice in the United States. Her work in decolonial, relational psychodynamic therapy with young adults focuses on issues of relationships, identity development, racial and sexual trauma, and immigration. Dr. Báez-Powell is passionate about social justice, seeking to make therapy and training more accessible across populations and language accessibility. She received the 2023 Early Career Practitioner Award from Division 29, the Society for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. Her previous publications center on the impact of identity and systemic oppression on supervision, training, and clinical work.

Jessica Chavez, iPh.D is a psychologist and Steering Committee Co-Chair for the 2024 Spring Meeting of Division 39 of the American Psychological Association.

Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP, is a staff psychologist, team leader, supervisor, and member of the therapy staff at the Austen Riggs Center. During her predoctoral internship, she was part of the Multi-Ethnic Counseling Center Alliance (MECCA) and has continued to promote dialogues across difference in her roles as (former) president of Division 39 (Psychoanalysis) of the American Psychological Association, (current) cochair of APCS and international coordinator of the Psychoanalytic Track at UDEM. Her writing, teaching, supervision, and consultations have focused on encouraging the development of future generations of clinicians and on promoting higher standards of practice in the field. A poet and artist herself, Dr. Charles has worked extensively with artists, writers, and musicians. She has a special interest in the creative process and is continues to investigate factors that facilitate and inhibit creativity. She also has a particular interest in the intergenerational transmission of trauma and its relationship to psychosis. She is actively engaged in mentoring, creating professional opportunities,

creating opportunities for dialogue, and promoting community involvement for those in the helping professions, including her consultation work with Gunawirra in Sydney, Australia, and with counseling centers and residential treatment centers in this country.

helen DeVinney, Psy.D (she/her) works in private practice in Washington, DC. In her clinical practice, writing, and teaching, she focuses on making systems of oppression visible as an integral part of understanding one's own psychology, relationships, and worldview. She is also a member of the core faculty in the Professional Psychology program at George Washington University.

Garth Greenwell, is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, it was named a Best Book of 2016 by over fifty publications in nine countries, and is being translated into fourteen languages. His second book of fiction, Cleanness, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize, and France’s Prix Sade (Deuxième sélection). Cleanness was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, a New York Times Critics Top 10 book of the year, and a Best Book of the year by the New Yorker, TIME, NPR, the BBC, and over thirty other publications. It is being translated into eight languages. A new novel, Small Rain, is forthcoming from FSG in 2024. Greenwell is also the co-editor, with R.O. Kwon, of the anthology KINK, which appeared in February 2021, was named a New York Times Notable Book, won the inaugural Joy Award from the #MarginsBookstore Collective, and became a national bestseller. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written nonfiction for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and Harper’s, among others. He writes regularly about literature, film, art and music for his Substack, To a Green Thought. He is the recipient of many honors for his work, including a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2021 Vursell Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Grinnell College, the University of Mississippi, and Princeton. Greenwell currently lives in New York, where he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at NYU.

Roula Hajjar, LMSW is a postgraduate psychotherapist at the Greene Clinic in Brooklyn, New York, and a candidate in analytic training at the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute.

Nour Nahhas, is a writer, researcher and activist based in Beirut. She holds a BA in Psychology from Haigazian University. Her writing and practice explore the nuances in gender, sexuality, migration, mental health and political economy. Her practice is rooted in anti-capitalist approaches to solidarity, mutuality, knowledge creation and care, with the goal of merging theory and practice and promoting critical perspectives to social and political issues.

Celeste Pietrusza, iPh.D is an analyticallyinformed psychotherapist in private practice in New York and California. She works in conjunction with the Greene Clinic in Brooklyn. For Celeste, writing, like clinical work, is not possible without community. She thanks Nat Newton for their encouragement and support on this essay and the editors of this issue, Roula Hajjar and Safia Albaiti, for the invitation to contri

Razzan Quran, is a writer, researcher and activist based in Beirut. She holds a BA in Psychology from Haigazian University. Her writing and practice explore the nuances in gender, sexuality, migration, mental health and political economy. Her practice is rooted in anti-capitalist approaches to solidarity, mutuality, knowledge creation and care, with the goal of merging theory and practice and promoting critical perspectives to social and political issues.

Avgi Saketopoulou, Psy.D, is a Cypriot and Greek immigrant, and a practicing psychoanalyst. She is a member of the faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and the author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023), and coauthor with Dr. Ann Pellegrini of Gender Without Identity (Unconscious In Translation, 2023).

Lara Sheehi, Psy.D, is the President of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA, Division 39), assistant professor of clinical psychology at the Doha Institute, co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality and co-editor of Counterspace in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. Lara is also a contributing editor to the Psychosocial Foundation's Parapraxis Magazine and on the advisory board for the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network. Lara's work takes up decolonial and anti-oppressive approaches to psychoanalysis, with a focus on liberation struggles in the Global South. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022) which won the Middle East Monitor's 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book.